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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



HENRI BERGSON 

A STUDY 
IN RADICAL EVOLUTION 



BOOKS BY EMIL CARL WLLM 



The Philosophy of Schiller, 

Boston, 1912. 
The Problem of Religion, 

Bostok, 1912. 
The Culture of Religion, 

Boston, 1912. 
Translation of Klemm, Ge- 

schichte der psychologie, 

New York, 1914. 
Henri Bergson: A Study in 

Radical Evolution, New 

York, 1914. 



HENRI BERGSON 

A Study 
in Radical Evolution 



By 



EMIL CARL WILM, Ph.D., LL.D. 

Professor of Philosophy in Wells College. Lecturer in 

Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College 

for 1914-15 



1Rew l^orfc 

STURGIS & WALTON 

COMPANY 

1914 
All Bights Reserved 



."B43W5 



Copyright 1914 
By STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1914 






VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY 

BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK 



OCT 27 1914 

©CU387199 
^0/ 



TO 
MRS. MAX PIUTTI 

DEAN OF WELLS COLLEGE 
IN HONOR AND RESPECT 



Die blosse Reflexion also ist eine Geis- 
teskrankheit des Menschen . . . welche 
sein hoheres Daseyn im Keim, sein 
geistiges Leben, welches nur aus der 
Identitat hervorgeht, in der Wurzel 
totet. Sie ist ein Ubel das den Men- 
schen selbst ins Leben begleitet und auch 
fiir die gemeineren Gegenstande der 
Betrachtung alle Anschauung in ihm 
zerstort. 

Schelling — Ideen zu einer Philoso- 
phic der Natur. 



PREFACE 

This little book is intended to be a brief and 
comparatively non-technical statement of Berg- 
son's philosophy which shall be intelligible to the 
general reader who wishes to know something 
of this much talked-of philosopher. Although 
fully recognising that such a book would meet a 
widely felt and entirely legitimate demand, I 
have not undertaken it without some misgivings. 
It is always difficult to do justice to a writer 
when one has to lift his leading ideas out of the 
context in which they properly belong. And I 
have no illusions of having succeeded completely 
in doing so. 

Bergson is particularly difficult to deal with in 
a summary sketch of this kind on account of the 
profusion of his thought and the extreme com- 
plexity of many of his ideas. For, in spite of 
the great interest of his teachings and the charm 
of his manner, Bergson is after all a technical 
writer, one who can hardly be treated adequately 
without bringing into requisition considerable 
scholarly apparatus. With the subtler compli- 
cations of his thought, and merely technical re- 



xii Preface 

finements, I have accordingly thought it wise not 
to deal at all. 

There is nothing more puzzling, in fact, to one 
interested in such things, than the unexampled 
enthusiasm over Bergson among the reading laity 
as well as among scientists and professional stu- 
dents of philosophy. Bergsonitis, which seems 
to be spreading around the world, is in most 
cases undoubtedly to be diagnosed as a purely 
subjective malady, due either to a process of 
auto-suggestion, or, what is more likely, to the 
persistent suggestive influence of a misguided 
public press. Any individual case of this dis- 
order can usually be relieved by a dose of Berg- 
son himself, as almost any sufferer can prove to 
his complete satisfaction. The case of the pub- 
lic press is of course of a different nature, and 
will require a different treatment. An interna- 
tional alliance might in any case be formed for 
the suppression of eulogistic pieces which are not 
accompanied by at least some explanation of 
what Bergson really teaches. 

I have myself not wished to add to the flood 
of merely laudatory literature on Bergson, nor 
have I wished, on the other hand, to hasten the 
disillusionment regarding him by writing in such 
a manner that the reader would not go further. 
I have tried, rather, to afford a clue to Berg- 
son's writings themselves, to which, I hope, the 
reader may be induced to go in order to supple- 



Preface xiii 

ment, and often to correct, the impressions he 
may have gotten from my fragmentary pages. 
I have, indeed, let Bergson speak for himself 
wherever possible; but the isolated passages 
quoted should by no means take the place, with 
the more serious student, of a more continuous 
reading of the sources. 

Bergson's principal books are three in num- 
ber, all of them translated into English. They 
are, to mention them in their chronological order, 
Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Mem- 
ory (1896), and Creative Evolution (1907). 
Besides these works Bergson has written a small 
book, Laughter, containing a theory of the 
comic, and a long list of articles. Perhaps the 
most important of these for his system is the one 
entitled Introduction a la Metaphysique, pub- 
lished in the Revue de Metaphysique et de 
Morale for January, 1903. An English trans- 
lation of this work has also recently been issued. 

The material of the present book (up to 
Section XIV), was originally given as two pub- 
lic lectures in Harvard University, and I have 
since presented the main part of it before a 
group of philosophy students in Wellesley Col- 
lege and, subsequently, at an open meeting of 
the Philosophy Club of Cornell University. 
The circumstance of its oral composition and 
delivery will partly account for an occasional 
informality and directness of statement which 



xiv Preface 

I have not been careful to remove in preparing 
the book for the press, as I could not assume 
that more than a small proportion of my 
readers would be specialists in philosophy, and 
as I believed that the non-philosophical reader 
would generally prefer the informal to the more 
circumstantial and more carefully modified 
presentation suited to the study and to pure 
scholarship. I have also moderated the rigour 
of a number of passages which I was sure, on 
second consideration, could not possibly be of 
much interest to any but comparatively hard- 
ened philosophers. 

I have to thank Professor Lovejoy, of Johns 
Hopkins University, for kindly reading the text 
in manuscript and for offering a number of 
important criticisms and suggestions. I only 
regret that the work of printing had pro- 
gressed so far when his comments reached me 
that I could not incorporate them as fully as I 
should have liked. I have, however, included 
in the subjoined bibliography a list of Mr. 
Love joy's own publications on Bergson in 
which the reader will find a full exposition of 
a number of points of first-rate historical and 
theoretical interest, such as the relation of 
leading Bergsonian doctrines to the Romantic 
philosophy of 1790-1805 (which I have myself 
commemorated by the passage from Schelling 
prefixed to this book), and to certain French 



Preface xv 

neo-criticists, and where he will also find a strik- 
ing criticism of Bergson's doctrine of time. 

My wife has read both the manuscript and 
the proof of the book, and made a number of 
very useful suggestions. M. Bergson has done 
me the honour of a similar service, which I 
hereby appreciatively acknowledge. Finally, 
my kinsman and friend, Professor Felix 
Krueger, of the University of Halle, read the 
critical portion of my text, and inflicted " faith- 
ful wounds " which have done the book (and 
I trust its author!) much good. 

E. C. WlLM. 

Aurora-on-Cayuga, New York, 
Easter, 1914. 



Contents 

SECTION PAGE 

I The New Philosophy and the 

Renaissance of Spirit • & 

II The Apotheosis of Change . . .17 

III Primordial Experience and Its In- 

tellectual Reconstruction . . 25 

IV The Dismemberment of the Soul . 31 

V The Dismemberment of the Soul 

(Continued) 39 

VI The External World and the 

World of Science 47 

VII Some Further Illustrations of 

Scientific Reconstruction . . 57 

VIII The True Method of Metaphysics: 

Intuition 65 

IX The True Method of Metaphysics: 

Intuition (Continued) ... 77 

X Of Evolution and Creation . . 85 

XI Of Mechanism and Design . . . 95 

XII The Freedom of Man .... 103 

XIII Retrospect and Summary . . .113 



Contents 

SECTION PAGE 

XIV Criticism of Bergson: The Doc- 
trine of Pure Change . . .119 

XV Criticism of Bergson: The Doc- 
trine of the Static Concept . 129 

XVI Bergson and the Philosophy of 

Religion — The Value of Life . 139 

XVII Bergson and the Philosophy of Re- 
ligion — The Problem of Death 153 

Bibliography 179 

Index 189 



I 

THE NEW PHILOSOPHY AND THE 
RENAISSANCE OF SPIRIT 



THE NEW PHILOSOPHY AND THE RENAISSANCE 
OF SPIRIT 

A good deal has lately been written about an 
alleged dearth of men of letters at the present 
time, and the suggestion has more than once 
been made that the rapid rise of science is largely 
responsible for a certain matter-of-fact mood 
and a prosaic habit of mind which are essentially | 
unfriendly to the production of imaginative lit- 
erature. And when one tries to recall the names 
of living writers whose genius compares with 
that of the great literary figures of the 
last few generations, Goethe and Schiller in 
Germany, Browning and Tennyson in England, 
Emerson and Poe in America, one cannot but 
feel that the observations referred to have some 
force. 

That disillusionment is a genuine trait of the 
modern mind is undoubtedly true. One or two 
other considerations, however, must be kept in 
mind. One is that fame is usually acquired 
tardily. Temporary obscurity must be the nor- 
mal lot of a creative mind in the very nature of 

the case, since the ideas and forms created must, 
3 



4 Henri Bergson 

just because they are original, first make their 
way in the world before they can reflect honour 
upon their source. Thus are genius and medi- 
ocrity often indistinguishable (a dangerous doc- 
trine to promulgate) until time has told between 
them. And even time's judgment may to the 
end remain vague and incompetent. " To be 
great," said Emerson, " is to be misunder- 
stood." 

A second very interesting reason for the ap- 
parent dearth of creative talent is that this is 
due, not to the fact that there is no such talent, 
but that there is so much. In an earlier day, 
when the means of publishing were meagre, only 
a few men engaged in literature, and the public 
notice which they received was proportionately 
general. With the increased facilities of print- 
ing, however, and the mental stimulus due 
thereto, a much greater number of men enter 
literature, with the result that it is becoming 
increasingly difficult to rise above the great mass 
of talented writers who are competitors for pub- 
lic favour. 

The observations made of fine literature ap- 
ply equally to other forms of spiritual endeav- 
our, to fine art, invention, science, and 
philosophy. It is truly interesting and re- 
markable, therefore, when a man arises who, 
amid the enormous intellectual competition un- 
der which he works, and in his own time and 



The New Philosophy 5 

generation, achieves the much-coveted distinc- 
tion of greatness. It is the more remarkable 
when such a man arises in a branch of learning 
like philosophy, which is at present suffering 
wide-spread indifference, or even positive disaf- 
fection. Paulsen has somewhere divided all 
knowledge into two fundamental kinds, that 
which is capable of direct application to the 
practical problems of life, and that which gives 
an added insight into the nature of the universe 
in which we live. Granting such a division to 
be a valid one, philosophy and literature would 
doubtless fall under the second head. Their 
value is theoretical and sentimental, rather than 
utilitarian or practical. But this is evidently 
not an age fond of pure speculation or of useless 
forms of sentiment. Knowledge, to repeat a 
well-worn commonplace, has no value for itself; 
its only value lies in its practical uses, whatever 
may be meant by this all-embracing piece of 
ambiguity. Philosophy, particularly, falls un- 
der the general condemnation. Unable to bake 
bread, and bringing nothing in her hand but the 
offerings of God, freedom and immortality, she 
has suffered a temporary eclipse, while the more 
hopeful members of the scientific fraternity are 
even ready to predict her eventual and ultimate 
extinction. 

In spite of these obvious difficulties, three 
philosophers, at least, have lately achieved 



6 Henri Bergson 

world-wide recognition, Eucken in Germany, 
James in America, and Bergson in France. It 
would be a most fascinating psychological study 
to analyse the type of mentality represented by 
these various writers with a view to finding the 
secret of their enormous popularity. Is this 
popularity only another illustration of crowd 
contagion? In a book like James' Pragmatism 
or Bergson's Creative Evolution, have we simply 
to do with a case similar to that of one of the 
" ten best sellers " which is read by multitudes, 
not on account of any intrinsic merit which the 
book possesses, but only because everybody is 
reading it? 

Doubtless, crowd contagion plays its part in 
spreading the reputation of a truly significant 
book as well as that of the latest novel whose 
cheapness is only surpassed by its hopeless in- 
anity. The true explanation, however, must 
strike deeper. Philosophical ideas, like other 
things, survive only in an environment fairly 
friendly to their existence and support. It will 
therefore likely be found that all these writers 
appeal in one way or another to that indefinable 
but very real and solid thing the Germans call 
Zeitgeist, the intellectual atmosphere and tend- 
encies of the time. The analysis of these writ- 
ers should, therefore, turn out to be also an 
index of the intellectual temper and outlook of 
their generation. They are truly representative 



The New Philosophy 7 

men, taking up into themselves and voicing the 
insights and feelings widely distributed through- 
out society, but too vague and inarticulate to 
find elsewhere clear expression. 

It is interesting to note, in any case, that in 
an age which has seen the apotheosis of power 
Eucken's system has been called activism, 
James' pragmatism, and Bergson's activism and 
pragmatism in turn. Doubtless, all these sys- 
tems are phases of what is broadly called vol- 
untarism in modern psychology and philosophy, 
the view which proclaims will or activity as the 
bottom property of things, the pivotal reality 
of the universe. 

An examination of the writings of these phi- 
losophers will reveal other traits which are com- 
mon to their generation. Let us notice these 
briefly. 

One is the strong feeling of discontent with the 
intellectual achievements of the past. They 
show almost an antipathy to the stereotyped 
forms in which traditional thought has prevail- 
ingly been cast. They all alike attack the rid- 
dle of existence in a new way, or else seek to 
express old truth with a new freshness and sin- 
cerity. 

Another trait common to these writers is their 
hearty sympathy with science, although they 
are ready enough to criticise science when it ex- 
tends its jurisdiction beyond its legitimate do- 



8 Henri Bergson 

main. 1 James and Bergson, indeed, began their 
academic careers as students of science, James 
in physiology and psychology, Bergson in 
mathematics. The admirable acquaintance of 
these writers with contemporary scientific litera- 
ture of both the physical and the life sciences 
has done much to regain for philosophy the re- 
spect of students of science which it has not 
always enjoyed. Indeed, science has a good 
deal to learn from a man like James, who was 
able to take facts as he found them, and to 
treat them in an impartial spirit, even if they 
belonged to departments of life which few men 
can enter without suffering disturbance of judg- 
ment. I have in mind, of course, James' classic 
studies of the phenomena of the religious con- 
sciousness, the results of which we have in his 
Varieties of Religious Experience, a model and 
a monument for every future scientific investi- 
gator. 

There is a third characteristic which is com- 
mon to all these writers, and that is their effort 
to bring philosophy down from heaven to earth, 

i Mr. Santayana apparently does not entirely approve 
of this. Bergson studies science conscientiously, he 
writes (in his Winds of Doctrine, p. 64), but "with a 
certain irritation and haste to be done with it, somewhat 
as a Jesuit might study Protestant theology." What 
Mr. Santayana evidently desires is that a philosopher 
shall study science in such a way that he will not wish 
to criticise it. But this demand is surely a trifle ex- 
cessive. 



The New Philosophy 9 

to bring it into a living relation with the 
problems of our daily existence. " The great 
masters of English and French philosophy," 
Bergson has recently been quoted as saying, 
" have this in common — that philosophy is not 
a thing of schools only; that it takes its origin 
in life, and that if it passes through the schools 
it has to enter again into life." In conformity 
with this thought that philosophy must connect 
itself with the problems of real life, all these 
writers seek to give their thought an intelligible 
and even an attractive expression. English and 
French philosophy have another thing in com- 
mon, according to Bergson: the striving for 
clearness of expression. " If one reads a pas- 
sage from Locke," he recently said, " of David 
Hume, of Berkeley, or of Mill, or a passage of 
Malebranche, or of Condillac, one arrives at the 
conclusion that there is no philosophy, however 
subtle, however profound, which cannot express 
itself in language which every one can under- 
stand." 

Bergson's gifts of philosophic exposition are 
indeed quite extraordinary, surpassed, among re- 
cent writers, only by those of James himself. 
It is not easy to speak with moderation of one 
loved and lately lost, but was there ever a style 
like James', combining to an equal degree 
strength with simplicity, vigour with deftness of 
touch, copiousness of thought with economy of 



10 Henri Beegson 

expression? It makes one think of a vigorous 
tree from which every dry limb has been cut 
away. James' style has not the blinding bril- 
liancy of Nietzsche's : it has become a perfect 
medium through which thought can pass with 
no perceptible loss from opacity or refraction. 
Not the least of the many services of William 
James to philosophy (especially American 
philosophy, which has not learned to speak its 
mother tongue) is the noble heritage of a really 
competent philosophic style, illustrated in such 
works as his Principles of Psychology, The Will 
to Believe, and Varieties of Religious Experi- 
ence. 

There is a fourth characteristic of the new 
philosophy which seems to be symptomatic of the 
new humanistic renaissance that has been such 
an unmistakable characteristic of the last de- 
cade or two. This is the new romanticism or 
idealism which it reflects. The philosophy of 
the last generation, deeply affected as it was by 
the results of physical science, tended strongly 
towards naturalism, which sought to extend con- 
ceptions whose employment had yielded such rich 
results in the study of nature — conceptions like 
force, mechanical causation, evolution through 
the survival of the fittest, etc., — to the universe 
as a whole, including the realms of life and mind. 
Life and mind were thus dislocated from the 
strategic place in the universe which they were 



The New Philosophy 11 

once supposed to occupy. Man was a bird on 
the mountain, consciousness an ephemeral fea- 
ture in the material universe, destined to disap- 
pear as soon as the physical conditions making 
it possible should no longer be realised. Cosmic 
purpose, the freedom of the will, immortality 
and other historical doctrines of much ethical 
and sentimental interest were so many fictions 
which had been rendered unworthy by the in- 
crease of knowledge. 

The resulting mood was one of wide-spread 
disillusionment. The end of wisdom was to be 
content with a modest lot, and to face uncom- 
plainingly the eventual extinction awaiting man 
and the race of men alike. Never has this mood 
been more eloquently voiced than by Bertrand 
Russell in his essay, The Freeman? s Worship: 
" Brief and powerless is man's life ; on him and 
all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and 
dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of de- 
struction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relent- 
less way; for man, condemned to-day to lose 
his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through 
the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, 
ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that 
ennoble his little day ; disdaining the coward ter- 
rors of the slave of fate, to worship at the shrine 
that his own hands have built ; undismayed by the 
empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from 
the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life ; 



12 Henri Bergson 

proudly defiant of the irresistible forces which 
tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his 
condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but un- 
yielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals 
have fashioned despite the trampling march of 
unconscious power." 

Well, in Eucken, James and Bergson, intrepid 
thinkers though they are, and willing to follow 
truth wherever it leads, we see a notable revival 
of anthropomorphic, humanistic ways of think- 
ing, in which man comes to his own again. 
Idealism, teleology, the creation of novelty in 
the world, ethical optimism, even immortality, 
again find a significant place in philosophy, 
thus affording a fresh illustration of a state- 
ment of William James written more than thirty 
years ago. " Nothing could be more absurd," 
wrote James, " than to hope for the definitive 
triumph of any philosophy which should refuse 
to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic 
manner, the more powerful of our emotional and 
practical tendencies. Fatalism, whose solving 
word in all crises of behaviour is ' all striving 
is vain,' will never reign supreme, for the im- 
pulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in 
the race." 

True, the idealism of our newest time can- 
not be the same idealism that we knew before 
science and naturalism had their say. The new 
idealism is a chastened idealism, with the cruder 



The New Philosophy 13 

features of the older systems pretty thoroughly 
left out; teleology is not of the old watch-mak- 
ing type; optimism rests upon the possibility 
of the world's becoming perfect rather than al- 
ready being so ; creation is evolutional in its 
method, and immortality may be a hard-won 
conquest rather than a present gift. The an- 
cient idol, it will be seen, is on its base again, 
but it wears a new aspect, and its base is wider 
and laid more deeply than before. It is the old 
idealism come to life again, like a root which 
sends new branches forth when the winter re- 
laxes its grasp; it is the old idealism with new 
features; the old idealism without the old com- 
placency; a critical, enlightened idealism; an 
idealism conscious of its strength, but conscious, 
too, of the vastness and the variety of its prob- 
lems, and of the difficulty of their eventual solu- 
tion. 



II 

THE APOTHEOSIS OF CHANGE 



II 

THE APOTHEOSIS OF CHANGE 

It is interesting, in view of what has been said, 
to find a writer like Professor Lovejoy char- 
acterising Bergson's philosophy as an evolution- 
ism which is at once radical and romantic. The 
two features of his thought are in a way sug- 
gested by the title of his latest important work, 
Creative Evolution, and we shall have abundant 
opportunity to notice illustrations of this two- 
fold aspect of Bergson's thought as we become 
more fully acquainted with his characteristic 
ideas. 

The thoroughgoing application of the notion 
of evolution is indeed the most striking aspect of 
Bergson's system. If one were asked to state 
in a single sentence the gist of Bergson's teach- 
ing, one could do no better than to repeat the 
celebrated Heraclitean doctrine, Reality is a 
flux. The only real aspect of things is their 
constant mutability. 

But the idea must be taken heroically, radi- 
cally. The fundamental doctrine of evolution, 

namely that the world has not always been what 
17 



18 Henri Bergson 

it is, but that it has arrived at its present stage 
of development gradually, by the accumulation 
of a vast number of finite changes, is indeed a 
commonplace both of science and of popular 
thought, and always has been. The theory of 
evolution or development, though often ascribed 
to Darwin and Herbert Spencer, is really of very 
ancient origin, and there has never been a time 
in the history of human thinking, from Anaxi- 
mander and Aristotle to Hegel and Bergson, 
when it has not had its representatives and 
champions. 

Evolution theories of the prevalent type, 
however, are after all only quasi-evolutionary. 
" Throughout most of the nineteenth century," 
says Professor Love joy, "the century of evolu- 
tionary ways of thinking in all the provinces 
of thought, both the idealistic philosophers and 
popular theology have taken their evolutionism 
with reserves — have, indeed, made it always 
subordinate to its logical opposites in metaphys- 
ics, the creationism of Hebrew cosmogony or the 
emanationism of the later Platonists. Both 
these fashions of conceiving the temporal aspect 
of things assumes that a sort of Being that is 
perfect and infinite and omnipotent must have 
come first in the order of existence — first logi- 
cally and chronologically and causally; and, 
what is more, that such a Being, even though 
it somehow engenders a world of beings imper- 



The Apotheosis of Change 19 

feet and finite and destined to struggle and to 
gradual development, remains itself no less per- 
fect and infinite and unperturbed." 

But if we are to adopt the flowing philosophy 
under the leadership of Bergson we must do so 
heartily and wholly: we must eliminate the last 
vestige of the static and the permanent, whether 
it exists in the form of a first and stable cause 
of things, a fundamental substance which under- 
lies all change, or even in the form of a plan or 
purpose which nature through its various muta- 
tions is striving to fulfil. The only thing which 
is permanent in the midst of change is, as 
Heraclitus long ago said, the law of change it- 
self. Stability anywhere else is mere appear- 
ance, the illusion of an imperfect human 
faculty. 1 

God is therefore not a creative force in the 
sense of a permanent personal cause who by the 
action of his will once for all creates things, or 
continually produces them. God is not a sub- 
stance, and his creations are not things. 
" Everything," says Bergson in Creative Evolu- 

i Still, according to other parts of Bergson's system, 
the vicissitudes which any phase of reality undergoes 
are not so drastic as to result in its complete (or even 
partial!) destruction. Our flying experiences always 
embody within themselves the accumulated history of 
the entire past. In fact, the contrast between the two 
ideas of radical becoming and eternal durability is so 
startling in Bergson's system as fairly to take one's 
breath away. Cf. further p. 82, n. 1, and pp. 94-5. 



20 Henri Bergson 

tiorby " is obscure in the idea of creation if we 
think of things which are created and a thing 
which creates, as we habitually do, as the under- 
standing cannot help doing. . . . But things 
and states are only views, taken by the mind, of 
becoming. There are no things, but only ac- 
tions. . . . God thus defined has nothing of the 
already made ; He is unceasing life, action, free- 
dom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery ; 
we experience it in ourselves when we act 
freely." 

We have encountered in this passage one of 
the most characteristic positions in Bergson's 
philosophy. The deepest, nay, the only, real 
aspect of things is change. But the intellect 
through its concepts represents reality as static. 
The flux of reality is transmuted into things; 
change becomes fixity ; nature is immobilised and 
falsified. Reality as it is has nothing in com- 
mon with reality as science represents it to us. 
For reality is nothing complete, it is in the mak- 
ing ; it is not perfection, but action ; not status, 
but life ; not fixity, but freedom. 

How comes it, then, that the scientific intel- 
lect has always treated reality as a collection of 
atoms, objects, classes, in short, statically? 

This brings us to a very fundamental point 
in Bergson's theory of knowledge: it is due, he 
replies, to the limitation of the intellect, which is 
merely an annex to the faculty of action. The 



The Apotheosis of Change 21 

function of the intellect is to preside over ac- 
tion, but action is possible only when phenomena 
are treated as integral and stable. Hence it 
comes to pass, as Bergson says in an oft-quoted 
passage, " that our human intellect feels at home 
among inanimate objects, more especially among 
solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and 
our industry its tools ; that our concepts have 
been formed on the model of solids; that our 
logic is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids; that 
our intellect triumphs in geometry." 

But an instrument developed merely in the 
interest of practical action is powerless to deal 
with reality as it is. The intellectual construc- 
tions of science, therefore, have no ultimate val- 
idity. Science is not metaphysics. 



Ill 

PRIMORDIAL EXPERIENCE AND ITS 
INTELLECTUAL RECONSTRUCTION 



in 



PRIMORDIAL, EXPERIENCE AND ITS INTELLECTUAL 
RECONSTRUCTION 

The notion of Bergson of the perfectly con- 
tinuous character of what is real, and his con- 
tention that the intellect essentially falsifies 
reality by casting it into stereotyped, atomic 
forms, are so characteristic of Bergson's philo- 
sophy, and so thoroughly violate our accus- 
tomed way of thinking, which trusts the in- 
tellect, and sees things substantially, that we 
shall do well to attempt at this point some 
preliminary exposition, as simple and impartial 
as may be, of the fundamental ideas under con- 
sideration. 

It is unquestionable that the primordial sense 
consciousness of the young infant or of one of 
the lower animal forms is a structureless, single- 
tissue affair, resembling in that respect the jelly- 
like body of an animal organism at a very low 
stage of zoological evolution. It is " a big, 
blooming, buzzing confusion," nowhere showing 
those cleavages, lines and boundaries which give 
to our maturer experience so much structure 
25 



26 Henri Bergson 

and relational variety. " Boundaries," says 
James in his posthumous book, Some Problems 
of Philosophy, " are things that intervene : but 
here [in the primordial, perceptual flux] noth- 
ing intervenes save parts of the perceptual flux 
itself, and these are overflowed by what they 
separate, so that whatever we distinguish and 
isolate conceptually is found perceptually to 
telescope and compenetrate and diffuse into its 
neighbours. The cuts we make are purely 
ideal." 

This breaking up of the original continuity 
is due to the selective power of attention, which 
isolates this or that aspect or detail, and to 
memory, which refuses to let the phase once 
isolated merge again with other parts of the 
mental field. James describes the process with 
characteristic skill : " Out of the original sen- 
sible muchness attention carves out objects and 
identifies them forever — in the sky constella- 
tions, on the earth beach, sea, cliff, bushes, grass. 
Out of time we cut days and nights, summers 
and winters. We say what each part of the 
sensible continuum is, and all these abstracted 
whats are concepts. The intellectual life of man 
consists almost wholly in his substitution of a 
conceptual order for the perceptual order in 
which his experience originally comes." 

It is thus through our intellectual analyses 
and recombinations that the objects, classes, lines 



Primordial Experience 27 

of spatial, temporal and dynamic relationship, 
which so endlessly divide our experience, come 
about, the whole taking on an increasing order 
and organisation with the progress of intellectual 
sophistication. What was originally homoge- 
neous thus becomes heterogeneous; what was 
telescoped and run together becomes differenti- 
ated and cut off. What was current and con- 
tinuous, Bergson would add, becomes immobile 
and stereotyped! For relation means fixation. 
The intellectual identification of parts or phases 
of the flux for purposes of future reference or 
practical control means their arrest and perma- 
nent solidification. 

We thus see the fundamental imperfection of 
all human knowledge, its inadequacy as an in- 
strument to convey to us the truth about that 
which is real. The phases of reality are evanes- 
cent; our ideas or concepts referring to them 
are motionless and eternal. Reality is fluent; 
our meanings are fixed and standardised. Real- 
ity as it is is wild and on the wing ; reality as it 
exists for the intellect is dead, mounted and 
scientifically classified. " The intellect," sa}'s 
Bertrand Russell, " may be compared to a 
carver, but it has the peculiarity of imagining 
that the chicken always was the separate pieces 
into which the carving-knife divides it." 

Now I suppose that the fundamental point 
at issue is whether reality is more adequately 



28 Henri Bergson 

represented in the bare awareness of primordial 
sense consciousness, in the undifferentiated, un- 
analysed mass which the earliest infant and ani- 
mal experience presents, or whether, on the 
other hand, we get an ever truer account of 
reality through the employment of the analytical 
and synthetic powers of intelligence which in our 
later maturity we so much use, and which we 
call by the proud name of reflection or reason. 
We confront here the rather startling question 
whether science really brings us nearer to the 
truth as it refines its methods and deepens its 
erudition, or whether the searcher after truth 
must not become as a child again, if he would 
enter the kingdom of incorruptible wisdom. 

But we must not prejudice the question by the 
use of question-begging epithets. Let us seek, 
rather, to brighten Bergson's distinctions by an 
actual investigation of the methods and results 
of science in the two great departments of in- 
tellectual endeavour, the mental and the phys- 
ical. 



IV 

THE DISMEMBERMENT OF THE SOUL 



IV 

THE DISMEMBERMENT OP THE SOUL . 

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the re- 
construction of reality by the scientific intellect 
is to begin with a type of reality to which we 
have the most complete and direct access, our 
own inner life of thought, feeling and will, the 
subject-matter of psychology. The various 
phases of our inner life are notoriously fluctu- 
ating. One of the most striking aspects of 
mental life is the continuous transition within 
it, its uninterrupted flow, in which occur no 
breaks, gaps or cleavages. It might be repre- 
sented, says Bergson in the Introduction a la 
Metaphysique, by a spectrum of innumerable 
colours each of which shades off by insensible 
gradations into another. Or it might be illus- 
trated by an infinitely elastic piece of rubber 
drawn together into a mathematical point which 
is then drawn out so as to generate a line which 
is being indefinitely prolonged. Let us further 
abstract completely from the time idea asso- 
ciated with the process of prolongation; also 
31 



32 Henri Bergson 

from the space through which the rubber is 
drawn. Let us, in short, try to realise pure 
movement, without admixture of artificial tem- 
poral or spatial elements: we then get a fair 
idea of the self in its most fundamental aspect, 
the aspect of pure duration. 

Still, neither illustration is quite adequate to 
reveal the intimate nature of the inner life. 
The spectrum, for example, is an already com- 
pleted thing, while the self is an enduring, grow- 
ing, interminable process. Besides, the colours 
in the spectrum lie side by side, occupy space. 
But the inner life is completely non-spatial. 
The other illustration of the infinitely elastic 
piece of rubber which is drawn out indefinitely 
does indeed illustrate somewhat better non-spa- 
tial duration, but the duration is a featureless 
duration, lacking the qualitative wealth, the 
richness of colour, characteristic of the life of 
the mind. The inner life combines continuous 
duration, qualitative diversity and unity of di- 
rection. No illustration can adequately repre- 
sent it. Concrete duration, which is the very 
essence of reality and life, cannot be repre- 
sented: it can only be lived. 1 

i It would be well-nigh impossible to exaggerate the 
importance of the concept (!) of " pure duration " for 
the whole of Bergson's system. The sample of reality 
obtained through the intuition of the unbroken move- 
ment of our real inner life, "le moi profond," is for 
Bergson a true sample of reality as a whole, of the un- 



Dismemberment of the Soul 83 

It is only another way of stating the idea of 
the concreteness and continuity of our psychical 
life when we say that the intimate character of 
any mental process or experience is determined 
through its organic connection with the person- 
ality as a whole, through the fact, as James ex- 
presses it, that each mental experience is a part 
of a personal consciousness. " It seems," says 
James, " as if the elementary psychic fact were 
not thought, or that thought, but my thought, 
every thought being owned. The universal con- 
scious fact is not, feelings and thoughts exist, 

divided or concrete (as opposed to mathematical) time 
which constitutes the very essence of being. Bergson's 
own estimate of the importance of this doctrine has been 
indicated in a letter to an American correspondent of 
the year 1911. "I daily discover (he wrote) how diffi- 
cult it is to bring people's minds to the perception of 
real duration and to make them see it as it is — that is 
to say, as indivisible though moving (or rather indivisi- 
ble because moving). I have scarcely done anything else 
in all that I have written except call attention to this; 
yet I am sure that I have not succeeded, for I observe 
that people study me and criticise me on many points 
rather than this one, which is the only essential one, and 
to which all other points should be attached, if one does 
not wish to run the risk of completely misunderstanding 
them. To any one who has gained a clear consciousness 
of this concrete duration, and who above all has learned 
to place himself again in it and habitually live in it, 
philosophy and reality itself take on a wholly new as- 
pect. Many problems disappear, and reality acquires 
so much intensity as to become luminous of itself, with- 
out having so great need of the light which philosophers 
profess to bring to it." 



84 Henri Bergson 

but I think and I feel." Conscious states, that 
is, do not exist as isolated or sundered elements : 
the whole history of the individual, Bergson 
teaches, is somehow recapitulated and epit- 
omised by them, the personality is present in 
its entirety in each of them. 

But how does scientific psychology proceed in 
dealing with an item of experience? It begins 
by isolating the experience, lifting it out of its 
concrete connections with the living personality, 
and thus strips it of everything about it which 
is unique and distinctive. The uniqueness of 
the psychical process cannot reappear in the 
concepts of psychology for the simple reason 
that it is the very nature of the concept to re- 
present only the general, the average, the recur- 
ring feature, not the individual or the unique. 

If the psychologist is dealing with inclination, 
for example, he is obliged to neglect those inex- 
pressible shades and nuances which distinguish 
my inclination, simply because it is mine, from 
that of any one else in the world. The psy- 
chologist's activity, to use an illustration of 
Bergson's, is very much like that of an artist 
who sketches, say, one of the towers of Notre 
Dame. The tower is of course an inseparable 
part of the cathedral as a whole, the cathedral 
has a certain setting within its surroundings, 
these are a part of the city of Paris, and so on. 
The tower itself, when seen in its total context, 



Dismemberment of the Soul 35 

is a thing of beauty: the sketch gives back a 
bloodless, fleshless skeleton, a mere shadow of 
the reality. 

The case would not be so hopeless if psycho- 
logy could dip into the mental stream and ex- 
hibit a true sample of psychic experience, no 
matter how small. But psychology, and every 
other science, for that matter, is perfectly help- 
less in this regard. No one, for example, could 
possibly convey to another an experience such as 
a colour, or an emotion, or an aspiration, by 
describing these experiences in the abstract 
terms of psychology, if the person had never 
experienced colours, emotions or aspirations for 
himself. The distinction here is the same as 
that which James makes between " acquaintance 
with " and " knowledge about." A person born 
blind might know as much about colours as 
Helmholtz himself, and still not know what col- 
our was, in the sense of having an actual ac- 
quaintance with colour. And so of mental 
experiences generally. 

Psychology, indeed, like every other science, 
does not proceed by partition, but by analysis. 
The distinction between partition and analysis, 
between a part and an element, Bergson illus- 
trates in a very clever way. A child can take 
the parts of pasteboard animals, in the game of 
" sliced animals," or the parts of a map, and 
easily reconstruct the animals or the map. But 



36 Henri Bergson 

no one could take the letters of, say, Milton's 
Lycidas, if they were all before him in the form 
of printer's pie, and reconstruct that master- 
piece if he had no previous knowledge of it. 
The reason, of course, is that the letters are not 
parts of the poem, but mere elements, artificial 
symbols. They may signify or represent real- 
ity, but they are not it, nor any part of it. 



V 

THE DISMEMBERMENT OF THE SOUL 
(Continued) 



THE DISMEMBERMENT OF THE SOUE ( CONTINUED ) 

The question is often asked to what extent 
Bergson is original, and to what extent he gives 
us a restatement, merely, of views which have 
been held, in some form or other, by previous 
thinkers in the history of ideas. The question 
cannot, of course, be answered categorically, for 
the reason that no one knows the complete his- 
tory of scientific and philosophical literature, so 
as to be able to say what in Bergson is entirely 
new, and what is second hand. Besides, the 
question could not easily be answered unless one 
knew to what extent Bergson himself was ac- 
quainted with all that has been said on the prob- 
lems of life and of reality. That he is a man of 
many-sided learning is without question. But 
to master the whole of philosophical literature 
is to-day, at least, quite beyond human power. 

One thing, however, is perfectly certain. 
Bergson is never content merely to repeat other 
men's opinions after them : he must test them for 
himself, and his critical powers are quite as no- 
table as is his erudition. He tears through all 
39 



40 Henri Bergson 

our historical distinctions, he ignores the stand- 
points of the schools, and he does so with an 
ease and an appearance of quiet confidence which 
quite disarms hostile opposition. Idealism and 
materialism, mechanism and teleology, intellec- 
tualism and pragmatism, fate and freedom : none 
of these time-honoured distinctions quite meets 
his needs. Of mechanism and purpose, for ex- 
ample, he says in a picturesque passage in his 
Creative Evolution : " We shall try to fit to 
the process of evolution the two ready-made 
garments of mechanism and teleology; we shall 
show that they do not fit, neither the one nor 
the other, but that one of them might be recut 
and resewn, and in this form fit less badly than 
the other." 

A case in point is the standing controversy 
between the rationalists and the empiricists (we 
should perhaps say the substantialists and the 
phenomenalists) in psychology, the former as- 
serting the soul to be a self-identical, changeless 
entity, a sort of substance, the latter insisting 
that it is nothing but a collection of psychical 
states or processes. 

The whole controversy is based upon the psy- 
chological abstractionism certain phases of 
which we discussed in the last section. Both 
points of view are equally wrong because they in- 
tellectualise the mental life, i. e., translate it 
into abstract scientific elements, and so reduce 



Dismemberment of the Soul 41 

it to a schema, a bloodless, lifeless entity, or 
collection of entities, instead of the living, mov- 
ing, creative thing that it is. The very es- 
sence of the psychical life is duration (duree) a 
perfect continuity in which there are no inter- 
ruptions, chasms or cleavages. In order for 
consciousness to continue, we well know, it must 
change, develop — create itself ever anew. 

But we already know the idiosyncrasy of the 
scientific intellect ; it always takes the fluid pro- 
cess and immobilises it — it never touches 
reality but to transform it. For the uninter- 
rupted process of the inner life the rationalist 
substitutes an unchanging entity, the " soul," 
the empiricist a collection of unchanging enti- 
ties, in the shape of sensations, images, percep- 
tions, ideas, etc., thus making the life of the 
mind consist in the mechanical interplay of 
these imaginary static entities, still-states or 
" states," which are in reality nothing more 
than verbal abstractions which have been 
analysed out of the living flow of the mind, the 
petrified symbols of mental becoming. 

Analytic psychology cannot of course do 
otherwise than deny the existence of the soul. 
It is the very business of analysis to break up the 
concrete whole into elements or states. After 
psychology has analysed the concrete personal- 
ity into so many elements or states it cannot, of 
course, expect to find it again. The word self 



42 Henri Bergson 

or soul, when applied to the sum total of these 
states, has no more meaning than the word 
Paris which the artist affixes to his various 
Parisian sketches or scenes. 

Philosophical empiricism, therefore, origi- 
nates in a misunderstanding of the very nature 
and significance of scientific analysis: its fun- 
damental error consists in mistaking the last 
products of its analysis for ultimate reality. 
But it is seeking the living among the dead : the 
soul cannot be found somewhere among its dis- 
membered parts, or, rather, among its symbolic 
substitutes. The reality has been left far be- 
hind. 

The rationalist is of course equally in error. 
Taking his start from the results of psycholog- 
ical analysis, he makes it his task to bring the 
disjecta membra of psychology together again. 
Armed with the same methods and instruments 
of search as empirical psychology, he starts out 
in quest of the soul, hoping to find it somewhere 
amid the contents of the mind, as named and 
described by psychology. Since, however, all 
the discoverable contents of the mind have al- 
ready been appropriated by psychology, there 
is nothing left for rationalism to do but to as- 
sert that the essence of the soul is pure form, a 
form free from all positive determination. The 
self is thus attenuated to a point where it loses 
all significance and character. It could belong 



Dismemberment of the Soul 43 

to Peter or Paul indifferently, without any one 
being the wiser, like an ill-fitting garment which 
can be worn by any number of persons for the 
simple reason that it fits no one of them. 

Empiricism, seeking the self under the guise 
of some specific process, ends by denying its ex- 
istence altogether; rationalism, seeking the self 
in the interstitial spaces, so to speak, which sepa- 
rate the mental states, fails to find it also. Un- 
able, however, to deny the undoubted integrity 
of the mental life, rationalism manufactures a 
self outrightly, and ascribes to it the synthetic 
function of bringing together again the sun- 
dered elements of psychology. 

But, as Hegel profoundly said, Das Wahre ist 
das Ganze, the truth lies in the whole. An em- 
piricism which is truly genuine, therefore, will 
have nothing in common with either traditional 
empiricism or traditional rationalism. It will 
employ neither analysis nor synthesis, but intui- 
tion. It will seek to come upon the life of the 
soul in its first intention, to follow it through 
its supple movements and its inward sinuosities. 
Such a method, an intuition of the soul by the 
soul, would give us a true metaphysic of the soul, 
instead of a heap of bare abstractions, the con- 
ceptual symbols, the empty shells of reality. 



VI 

THE EXTERNAL WORLD AND THE 
WORLD OF SCIENCE 



VI 



THE EXTERNAL, WORLD AND THE WORLD OF 
SCIENCE 

We have so far dealt with Bergson's descrip- 
tion and criticism of the intellectualistic ac- 
count of the inner life as given by the science of 
psychology. We come now to a more difficult 
part of our task, the interpretation of Berg- 
son's view of the true nature of the external 
world. Is the account which science gives of 
that also symbolic and imperfect, and, if so, do 
we have any access to physical nature which is 
more trustworthy and penetrating than the 
method used by physical science? 

The case against a static view of things, such 
as science, according to Bergson, always gives, 
seems to be more difficult to establish in the 
realm of matter, at least to the satisfaction of 
common sense, than in the realm of the mind. 
Common sense is rather ready to admit, if it can 
be brought to introspect carefully, that abso- 
lutely constant features in the life of the soul are 
difficult to identify. But when we come to the 

world of matter the case seems to be different. 

47 



48 Henri Bergson 

For do we not distinguish between the physical 
sciences and psychology by asserting that the 
former deal with things, objects with compara- 
tively permanent spatial delineations, while the 
subject matter of psychology is exclusively 
processes ? 

Bergson does indeed find it hard to break with 
the older dualism of the Cartesian type which 
made a clean-cut distinction between the ma- 
terial and the mental, and the two are often 
thrown into rather sharp opposition, as we shall 
see more fully later, when we come to the dis- 
cussion of Bergson's view of the mechanism of 
evolution. Still, common sense and science do 
recognise change in nature, although this change 
is often so gradual as to be imperceptible. The 
tooth of time, all admit, will destroy the most 
enduring monuments of nature and of human 
art if only the interval taken is sufficiently long. 

Science, however, after all seems to treat 
change as if it were something adventitious, 
something imposed upon nature from without. 
Change, for example, is often said to consist in 
a mere redistribution of elements which are in 
themselves unchangeable. Rest, inertia, is 
treated as if it were the native property of mat- 
ter, and motion as if it were a mere function of 
rest. The problem of the primacy of rest or 
motion, permanence or change, is indeed a very 
ancient one, and has been recognised and dis- 



The External World 49 

cussed throughout the whole history of philo- 
sophy. 

Bergson's point of view here, too, is that of 
radical evolutionism. The bottom property of 
things is duration: reality is a living spring or 
bound. The static view of things which science 
gives us is due to its taking momentary " views " 
of reality, snap shots, as it were, which the in- 
tellect takes of reality as it passes. Each snap 
shot taken of a rapidly moving object repre- 
sents the object as stationary. But no matter 
how many such rests we add together, their sum 
is never a movement, just as a series of short, 
straight lines, placed end to end, never gives us 
a true curve. Real time, then, or duration, 
which is fluent and continuous, is broken up by 
science into a discrete series of static moments. 
Similarly, motion, equally fluent and continuous, 
is represented by the intellect as a simultaneity 
of a static series of moments of time with an 
equally static series of points in space, much 
as a railroad time table does not show the 
movements of trains, but only the station stops. 
At such a time the train is at such a place. 

The failure to apprehend the true continuity 
of motion and change has given rise to the con- 
tradictions the impotent grappling with which 
makes the history of philosophy seem so much 
like a long drawn out and unprofitable contest 
of words. Zeno, using the weapons of the in- 



50 Henri Bergson 

tellectualist, proved that a " flying " arrow can- 
not really move, because it must at any one 
moment be at a given point and at no other. 
The solution of this ancient puzzle is that the 
arrow never is at any point of its course, be- 
cause it doesn't stop. Its movement is not a 
sum of rests : it is absolutely indecomposable. 

In fact, it is not motion and change in nature 
which have to be explained, but their opposite, 
rest. Given motion, you can explain rest read- 
ily enough in terms of movement. But if you 
start with absolute rest you can never get to 
motion. What we call rest in nature, in fact, is 
a derived and illusory feature: it is merely due 
to the relation among movements. All the ob- 
jects in this room seem to be at rest; as a matter 
of fact, they are moving through space with a 
breathless velocity. The various movements 
are not perceptible, however, because they have 
the same rate and rhythm. " It is not enough," 
Bergson recently said in a lecture delivered at 
the University of London, " it is not enough to 
say that everything changes and moves ; we must 
believe it. Let us assume that everything 
changes and moves, what will result from that 
proposition? The first result will be that im- 
mobility is a thing more complicated than move- 
ment. We like to say that immobility is a real- 
ity, as movement is also. We start from 
immobility, but if we really take seriously the 



The External World 51 

proposition that everything is in movement, that 
everything changes, then there is no immobility. 
What we call immobility is a composite — a re- 
lation between movements. This is seen from 
what happens if we are in a train while another 
train is moving in the same direction beside ours 
and at the same speed. We say that the second 
train is motionless, and the people in that train 
say that ours is motionless. Similarly, immo- 
bility is a relation between two or more things. 
Immobility is a thing more complex than move- 
ment — it consists of at least two movements." 

The same thing, Bergson adds, can be said of 
the " state " of things and of change. " What 
we call a state is the appearance which a change 
assumes in the eyes of a being who himself 
changes according to an identical or analogous 
rhythm." 

The sum is that the native stuff of things 
overflows all our scientific descriptions of it : life 
is vastly richer than knowledge, and reality than 
intellect. Our conceptual constructions do not 
reproduce or duplicate reality, they are simply 
so many Hilfsmittel, convenient aids to action, 
but without metaphysical significance. The in- 
tellect's concepts are practical, not speculative, 
in their significance. 

Bergson is a master of metaphor and of con- 
crete illustration, a useful but dangerous weapon 
in the hands of the philosopher, when it is not 



52 Henri Bergson 

used circumspectly. But weapon-wielding is not 
an activity favourable to philosophic calm, and 
weapon-wielders have never been noted for 
the delicate quality of their artistry. The 
reader should be warned, therefore, against tak- 
ing Bergson's illustrations as anything more 
than they are meant to be, suggestions and il- 
lustrations of the truth, rather than complete 
expositions of it. It would clearly be unjust 
to Bergson to try to make his illustrations 
" walk on all fours," to extend them beyond a 
point where they cease to illustrate. 

The intellect, he suggests somewhere in his 
Introduction a la Metaphysique, may be likened 
to a prism through which white light is passed. 
Just as the white light is decomposed into the 
various colours of the spectrum, so reality is 
always shattered by being passed through the 
intellect. There is an important point, how- 
ever, upon which Bergson always insists: you 
can take reality and analyse it into elements, but 
you can by no means reconstruct reality out 
of the elements which are the product of your 
analysis, in the way you can recompose the col- 
ours of the spectrum and get white light again. 
Analysis, it will be remembered, gives us only 
elements, never parts. Science does not proceed 
by partition, but by reconstruction. 

Elsewhere he uses another illustration to make 



The External World 58 

clear the merely representative character of sci- 
entific symbolism, the fact that the concepts of 
the intellect are mere surrogates of reality, 
rather than samples of it. Reality, he says, is 
like a gold coin for which one has received 
change in baser metal. The gold coin is homo- 
geneous and intrinsically precious. Its value 
(let us say) is the value actually represented 
by the gold contained in it. But the baser coins 
are merely so many counters; they serve as a 
medium of exchange, and as such they are valu- 
able. But aside from this practical use to which 
they are put, they have no interest for us what- 
soever. Like the counters of science, they have 
no intrinsic value. They are intrinsically un- 
real. 

This, in brief outline, constitutes the attack 
upon the intellect with which Bergson is often 
charged. And the result is indeed hardly calcu- 
lated to support the proud claims often made 
for scientific knowledge. " Instead of intellec- 
tual knowledge being the profounder," James 
says, interpreting Bergson, " he calls it the more 
superficial. Instead of being the only adequate 
knowledge, it is grossly inadequate, and its only 
superiority is the practical one of enabling us to 
make short cuts through experience and thereby 
to save time. Dive back into the flux itself, 
then, Bergson tells us, if you wish to know real- 



54 Henri Bergson 

ity, that flux which Platonism, in its strange 
belief that only the immutable is excellent, has 
always spurned; turn your face towards sensa- 
tion, that flesh-bound thing which rationalism 
has always loaded with abuse." 



VII 

SOME FURTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF 
SCIENTIFIC RECONSTRUCTION 



, 



VII 



SOME FURTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC 
RECONSTRUCTION 

We have dealt thus at length with Bergson's 
criticism of scientific symbolism because many 
of his other doctrines, as will be seen more fully 
later, are thoroughly affected by his fundamen- 
tal view of the nature of science, and the ultimate 
validity of its categories and formulas. Many 
of the current philosophical views of the world 
and of life, such as the existence of mechanical 
causation, the nature and method of evolution, 
the freedom of the will, and the place of life and 
mind in reality, depend upon certain presupposi- 
tions and theories of science which are generally 
taken as ultimate truth, at least until they are 
superseded by other data of a similar kind. 
But suppose these presuppositions and theories 
turn out to be merely a vast system of symbols 
which have a high value for the purposes of 
controlling nature, but have otherwise no specu- 
lative or metaphysical validity? This is pre- 
cisely what Bergson maintains. 

It is only fair to Bergson to say that the 
57 



58 Henri Bergson 

criticism of scientific concepts and formulas 
which is such a striking feature of his philoso- 
phy is not by any means original with him, but 
that discussions of a similar sort have been car- 
ried on in various quarters for more than a gen- 
eration, not to mention the profound reaction 
to intellectualism represented by the philo- 
sophies of Jacobi, Schelling and their fellow 
romanticists near the opening of the nineteenth 
century. 

Much, for instance, has lately been said about 
the merely " abstract " or " hypothetical " char- 
acter of scientific laws, the fact, that is, that 
these laws, often said to be exact, are not actu- 
ally exemplified in nature, but hold only when 
they are taken abstractly, i. e., when they oper- 
ate, not under actual, but under hypothetical 
conditions, conditions which are nowhere real- 
ised. An illustration or two will make this clear. 
We shall do well to take our illustrations from 
the most exact sciences which we have, mathe- 
matics and mechanics. 

The three angles of a triangle are said to 
equal two right angles, but this is true only of an 
abstract or imaginary triangle, and applies to 
no case of a triangle found in nature. Sir Oli- 
ver Lodge has recently called attention to the 
difference between such an abstract triangle, a 
purely mathematical object, and the concrete 
one drawn, for example, on the surface of a calm 



The External World 59 

sheet of water. The surface here, though per- 
haps as flat as ever found in nature, is not flat, 
but is part of a sphere, and the proposition does 
not hold. 

Or take another instance. The proposition 
that one and one make two is, if these numbers 
are taken in the abstract, quite beyond con- 
troversy. But are we so sure that one and one 
make two when we are dealing, not with abstract 
numbers, but with concrete objects? " It is not 
true," Lodge reminds us, " for two globules of 
mercury, for instance, nor for a couple of col- 
liding stars ; not true for a pint of water, added 
to a pint of oil of vitriol, not for nitric oxide 
added to oxygen, nor for the ingredients of an 
explosive mixture; not necessarily true, either, 
for snakes in a cage, or for capital invested in a 
business concern, flourishing or otherwise; nor 
is it true, save in a temporary manner, for a 
couple of trout added to a pond. Life can ridi- 
cule arithmetic." 

A still more enlightening illustration, perhaps, 
is that of the law of the lever, taken from me- 
chanics. This law states that equilibrium is 
maintained when the weights at each side of the 
fulcrum are equal. But in order for this law to 
hold, a number of conditions must be fulfilled. 
The lever must be of homogeneous structure and 
absolutely rigid; the fulcrum must be a mathe- 
matical point, so as to exclude the possibility of 



60 Henri Bergson 

friction ; the weights must be of such a nature as 
not to affect the lever by anything except their 
actual weight, etc. But, evidently, these condi- 
tions are neither separately nor collectively real- 
ised in any actual case of a lever in operation. 
The law of the lever, again, holds only in the 
abstract, that is, under purely hypothetical con- 
ditions. 

What applies in the above instances applies 
to all laws of nature whatsoever. The only 
cases in which they are really exact are the cases 
in which they are abstractly or hypothetically 
stated. In nature they are never more than 
roughly approximated. 

The reader acquainted with modern philoso- 
phical literature and with the literature on the 
methods of science will have recognised motives 
in the foregoing account of Bergson which ap- 
pear also in a large number of thinkers belong- 
ing to every type of scientific and philosophical 
persuasion. Hegel himself, that most abused of 
" intellectualists," had an almost immodest share 
in the criticism of concepts, a fact seldom sensed 
by professional anti-Hegelians who, it appears, 
often expend more energy hating Hegel than 
reading him. The most important names among 
more recent writers are those of Laas, Dilthey, 
Vaihinger, Mach, Marchesini, Lipps, Hertz, Ost- 
wald, Poincare, F. Klein, and Bertrand Russell, 
but there is a score of others. An extensive ac- 



The External World 61 

count of the literature, together with a compre- 
hensive discussion of the whole subject, will be 
found in the great work of Vaihinger, recently 
published, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, The Phi- 
losophy of the Fictitious, to which the German- 
reading student may go if he wishes to follow 
the subject further. 

That psychologists, at least, labour under no 
misapprehensions as to the ultimate significance 
of psychological concepts is illustrated by the 
following vigorous passage, taken from Miin- 
sterberg's Psychology and Life, which is typical 
of the views, expressed or understood, of a large 
number of leading psychologists : 

" Natural science considers the world as a 
mechanism, and for that purpose transforms the 
reality in a most complicated and ingenious way. 
It puts in the place of the perceivable objects 
unperceivable atoms which are merely products 
of mathematical construction, quite unlike any 
known thing. . . . There is, indeed, no physical 
object in the world which science ought not to 
transmute into atoms, but no atom in the world 
has physical reality; and these two statements 
do not contradict each other. 

In the same way psychology is right, but the 
psychologism which considers the psychological 
elements and their mechanism as reality is wrong 
from its root to its top, and this psychologism is 
not a bit better than materialism. ... A 



62 Henri Bergson 

psychical element . . . has as little reality as 
have the atoms of the physicist. Our body is 
not a heap of atoms ; our inner life is still less a 
heap of ideas and feelings and emotions and vo- 
litions, if we are to take these mental things in 
the way the psychologist has to take them, as 
contents of consciousness made up of psychical 
elements." 



VIII 

THE TRUE METHOD OF META- 
PHYSICS: INTUITION 



VIII 

THE TRUE METHOD OF METAPHYSICS: IN- 
TUITION 

What, then, is the net result so far as man's 
ability to fathom the nature of reality is con- 
cerned? Does Bergson's doctrine issue in scep- 
ticism or agnosticism, as Mr. H. Wildon Carr 
and others have suggested? 

That would be the case, Bergson answers, if 
man were pure intellect, and if the only kind of 
knowledge accessible to man were scientific 
knowledge. Scientific knowledge, pursued ex- 
clusively, does indeed lead to relativism and scep- 
ticism. But man is not shut up to the necessity 
of always transmuting reality into scientific con- 
cepts and symbols. There is an entirely differ- 
ent method of approaching truth. This method, 
as has been already hinted, is intuition. 

It is unfortunate that the philosopher must 
employ terms which have long been in common 
use, or else run the risk of not being understood 
at all. Such words become smooth and char- 
acterless, like coins which have long been in cir- 
culation. What is the meaning of the term 

intuition, as used so commonly in everyday 
65 



66 Henri Bergsoist 

speech, and in philosophy and theology? One 
cannot give the meaning of the term, for it has 
no one meaning; one can only give its meanings, 
of which, omitting the more unusual and tech- 
nical, there seem to be about four. 

It is used, in the first place, as the equivalent 
of sense-perception, the immediate apprehen- 
sion of physical reality, as when one examines 
an object, like an orange, and receives the 
various sense impressions, visual, tactual, olfac- 
tory and other, which seem to emanate from it. 
It is used, secondly, for introspection, for the im- 
mediate apprehension of our inner states, as 
when one observes introspectively some emotion, 
impulse or train of ideas which runs its course 
in the mind. Intuition is also used, third, for 
an alleged immediate, that is, unreasoned, know- 
ledge of certain so-called first principles, funda- 
mental truths, etc., like the existence of God, the 
freedom of the will, and the like, which, though 
unreasoned, are said to be known with the cer- 
tainty of mathematical axioms. Finally, the 
term is used in a somewhat more cabalistic sense 
to stand for a sort of mystical approach to 
truth, a process in which ecstatic and emotional 
promptings figure conspicuously, a sort of in- 
effable illumination or supernatural vision, quite 
unlike the various more mundane forms of sen- 
sory and intellectual knowledge known to ortho- 
dox science and philosophy. 



True Method of Metaphysics 67 

In which of these various senses, if any, does 
Bergson employ the term intuition? James 
drops an interesting hint in the passage in A 
Pluralistic Universe which was quoted above, ac- 
cording to which intuition means simply sense 
perception, a " turning toward sensation, that 
flesh-bound thing which rationalism has always 
loaded with abuse." The contrast, as James 
outlines it, is simply between immediate sense 
perception, on the one hand, and conceptual 
knowledge, on the other, an interpretation which 
seems to have been suggested more by James' 
own epistemological predilections than by a care- 
ful reading of Bergson's text. 

It would be an interesting philological task to 
collect and to study comparatively the various 
passages referring to intuition which are scat- 
tered throughout Bergson's writings. Such a 
study would certainly show that intuition is not 
the same as the intellectual or conceptual know- 
ledge of science; it would almost as certainly 
show, I think, that it is something more active 
and esoteric than sensational or perceptual 
knowledge, as this is ordinarily understood. If 
any ambiguity attaches to the term it must be 
that the experience referred to is one which can- 
not easily be conveyed by description, thus sup- 
porting (and shall we say refuting?) Bergson's 
position with regard to the communicability of 
any first-hand experience. And Bergson more 



68 Henri Bergson 

than once hints that each man must exercise in- 
tuition for himself if he would know what 
reality, and, I presume, what intuition is. 1 

This does not, however, prevent Bergson from 
trying, time and again, to convey some notion of 
what he means by intuition. " If it isn't clear," 
some one has said, " it isn't French." Well, if 
the meaning of intuition in Bergson is not clear, 
it is certainly not the fault of Bergson, who is 
too sincerely French to repeat the well-worn trick 
of dealing with a difficulty by studiously avoid- 
ing it. 

In Creative Evolution he refers repeatedly to 
a " vague nebulosity " which surrounds the 
" luminous nucleus " which we call the intellect. 
" Therein," he asserts, " reside certain powers 
that are complementary to the understanding, 
powers of which we have only an indistinct feel- 
ing when we remain shut up in ourselves, but 
which will become clear and distinct when they 
perceive themselves at work, so to speak, in the 
evolution of nature." 

Elsewhere in the same work he says : " The 
feeling we have of our evolution and of the evolu- 
tion of all things is there, forming around the 
intellectual concept properly so-called an indis- 
tinct fringe that fades off into darkness. . . . 

i In a letter to an American correspondent Bergson 
writes that his intuition of duration " repugne a l'essence 
meme du langage," i. e., it is essentially ineffable, an eso- 
teric mystery. 



True Method of Metaphysics 69 

This nucleus has been formed out of the rest by 
condensation, and . . . the whole must be used, 
the fluid as well as and more than the condensed, 
in order to grasp the inner movement of life. 
Indeed, if the fringe exists, however delicate and 
indistinct, it should have more importance for 
philosophy than the bright nucleus it surrounds. 
For it is its presence that enables us to affirm 
that the nucleus is a nucleus, that pure intellect 
is a contraction, by condensation, of a more ex- 
tensive power. And, just because this vague 
intuition is of no help in directing our action on 
things, which action takes place exclusively on 
the surface of reality, we may presume that it 
is to be exercised not merely on the surface, 
but below." 

A favourite way of describing intuition is to 
say that it is a process of installing oneself 
within reality, transporting oneself into the 
process of becoming itself, rather than taking 
mere " views " of it from without. " On ap- 
pelle intuition," Bergson says in a critical pas- 
sage in his Introduction a la Metaphysique, 
" cette espece de sympathie intellectuelle par 
laquelle on se transports a l'interieur d'un objet 
pour coincider avec ce qu'il a d'unique et par 
consequent d'inexprimable." " Intuition is a 
kind of intellectual sympathy in virtue of which 
one installs himself within the object in order to 
come upon that in the object which is unique and 



70 Henri Bergson 

hence inexpressible." This is contrasted with 
analysis which is " the operation by which one 
reduces the object to such elements as are al- 
ready known, such as the object has in common 
with other objects." 

The notion of intuition does not give us much 
trouble so long as we confine ourselves to the 
observation of our own inner life, for we doubt- 
less do have an immediate and sympathetic ac- 
quaintance with our thoughts, emotions and will- 
attitudes which no one can take from us, and 
which no amount of psychological description 
could possibly replace. Intuition of the inner 
life might, then, mean simply living it, and 
grasping the whole of it in a single, sympathetic 
view. In such an intuition, as we have already 
seen, the terms and distinctions of the psycho- 
logy books would be completely left behind, and 
the soul life would be apprehended in its indi- 
visible unity — a unity in which there would be 
no external juxtaposition of parts, previously 
scissored out of the concrete flow of experience, 
and no sharply sundered before and after, but a 
complete interpenetration of phases, each phase 
qualifying and impregnating every other. The 
content of intuition is pure " duration " ; in- 
tuition is just this non-analytical appreciation 
of the unbroken flow of inner experiences — un- 
broken except for the qualitative modulations 
within it, those variations of colour and em- 



True Method of Metaphysics 71 

phasis which render our inner life so replete 
with interest and vicissitude. 

So far the matter is simple enough. But 
when we come to inquire into the power of intu- 
ition to penetrate external nature (provided we 
really mean more by intuition than simple sense 
perception), the problem becomes decidedly 
more difficult. Precisely what, we may ask, does 
Bergson mean by installing oneself within a 
reality other than ourselves ? He evidently does 
not mean to suggest a mere extension of our per- 
ceptual knowledge by an exploration of the 
object's inner structure, as when we cut into the 
earth's crust in order to learn its geological 
formation. The inner life of an object, in 
Bergson's sense, would hardly be revealed by 
such an anatomical investigation, any more than 
the psychical life which is supposed to go in 
the brain would be revealed by a study of its 
inner structure, or any more than the life of a 
college, or college spirit, could be found by look- 
ing inside the buildings rather than at their out- 
sides. 

The phrase " intellectual sympathy " used by 
Bergson in the definition of intuition quoted 
above seems to suggest the answer. The 
process of intuition appears to involve an ascrip- 
tion to nature of a psychical life similar 
to our own. It is only by thus animating it, 
by viewing it in impassioned contemplation, that 



72 Henri Bergson 

I can penetrate nature's outward shell, and enter 
into the true inwardness of its life. This seems 
to be the meaning of Bergson's statement that 
knowledge implies a coincidence of the mind 
with the generative act of reality, with the evolu- 
tion of things : the only way to know an ob j ect, 
he often asserts, is to become it. We seem to 
have here the familiar thought of idealism that 
there must an ontological affinity between the 
mind and its object if the mind is really to know 
its object. 

The reader acquainted with the philosophy of 
Leibniz must have noticed that the phases of 
Bergson's doctrine just touched upon are rather 
distinctly reminiscent of certain characteristic 
views of the illustrious German savant of the 
seventeenth century. Reality, according to 
Leibniz, consists ultimately of monads, indivis- 
ible centers of sentiency and energy, each of 
which, as the name implies, is completely self- 
enclosed, completely cut off from its surround- 
ings. It is a true individual. Monads, to use 
the picturesque language of Leibniz, have no 
windows, so that nothing can enter into them or 
pass out. If that is the case, how can one 
monad ever know the other? How can the 
monad which is the soul, for example, ever know 
the world? 

It is possible, Leibniz answers, only because 
each monad is the world in miniature; it is a 



True Method of Metaphysics 73 

microcosm reflecting the world in its entirety 
within its own inner life. Upon its little stage 
the drama of the world is re-enacted. " Every- 
thing is in everything," a French writer has said, 
and Tennyson suggests that if we knew the 
flower in the crannied wall, root and branch, that 
is, if we had an intimate and exhaustive know- 
ledge of it, then we should know what God and 
man are. The typical character of every item 
of reality seems to be in mind in both these state- 
ments. 



IX 

THE TRUE METHOD OF META- 
PHYSICS: INTUITION 
(Continued) 



IX 



the true method of metaphysics : intuition 
(Continued) 

It will perhaps aid us in getting some notion 
of the intellectual sympathy of which Bergson 
speaks, the Miterleben, that sharing of the inner 
life of the reality which we aspire to grasp, if we 
remind ourselves of some illustrations of this 
process with which we are acquainted in our 
experience. 

The projection of our own ideas and feelings 
into the mind of another person is of course a 
very familiar process, and the hopeless inability 
of two persons to understand each other if there 
exists between them some invincible discrepancy 
of temperament or point of view is one of the 
most familiar of human experiences. The only 
way to understand a writer or an historical 
figure, we often hear, is to suppress, for the time 
being, one's own merely private personalit}' or 
selfhood, to take the point of view of the person 
concerned, etc. 

The nearest analogue to this partial assimila- 
tion of subject and object in our relation with 
77 



78 Henri Beegson 

what is usually considered the inanimate world is 
the process of so-called aesthetic sympathy (the 
German Einfiihlung) by which, to use the words 
of Groos, " we live through the psychic life which 
a lifeless object would experience if it possessed 
a mental life like our own." 

Many writers on aesthetics have indeed made 
this humanising of the object of aesthetic ap- 
preciation the essential condition of the aesthetic 
gratification which it yields. So the poet 
Schiller, to cite only one notable instance, de- 
fined the nature of beauty to be freedom-in- 
the-appearance, or phenomenal freedom, which, 
translated into everyday English, simply means 
that any object, in order to appear beautiful, 
must have the appearance of freedom, must be 
free from any trace of constraint or stress. 
Thus, a rugged oak, a beautiful vase, a slender 
birch, or, to use Schiller's crowning instance, a 
beautiful personality, all alike convey the sug- 
gestion of poised self-mastery, of perfect free- 
dom. In all these cases the process of Einfiih- 
lung, or empathy, as Professor Titchener has 
recently called it, seems to take place. We 
imagine the object as capable of feeling distress 
incident to outward constraint, the exhilaration 
and joy of freedom, etc. 

Bergson, indeed, in a significant passage in 
Creative Evolution, makes the identical compar- 
ison between metaphysical and aesthetic intuition 



True Method of Metaphysics 79 

of which we are here speaking. " That an effort 
of this kind," Bergson says, referring to in- 
tuition, " is not impossible, is proved by the 
existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along 
with normal perception. Our eye perceives the 
features of a living being merely as assembled, 
not as mutually organised. The intention of 
life, the simple movement that runs through the 
lines, that binds them together and gives them 
significance, escapes it. This intention is just 
what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself 
back within the object by a kind of sympathy, in 
breaking down, by an effort of intuition, the 
barrier that space puts up between him and his 
model." In more than one place, indeed, 
especially in the Introduction a la Metaphysique, 
Bergson compares the philosopher with the poet. 
Neither employs the method of analysis upon 
which science exclusively relies: their common 
method is intuition. 

The whole point of view presented here will 
doubtless be better appreciated by the nature 
poet of the Wordsworthian type than by the 
scientist or philosopher whose finer perception 
has, according to Bergson, been dulled, and his 
power of immediate insight stultified, by the 
method of scientific indirection which he has long 
practised. Writers on literature have of course 
made much of the peculiar gifts of the poet, and 
poetry abounds in passages the sweep and in- 



80 Henri Bergson 

sight of which does sometimes seem to place the 
poet under a category exclusively his own. One 
of the most notable examples of nature anima- 
tion and of dramatic sympathy with nature's 
supposed inner life is the exquisite piece of 
rhetoric in Part V of Browning's Paracelsus, the 
first lines of which could not be improved upon 
as a description of Bergson's distinction between 
intellect and instinct : 

I knew, I felt (perception unexpressed, 
Uncomprehended by our narrow thought, 
But somehow felt and known in every shift 
And change of the spirit, — nay in every pore 
Of the body, even), — what God is, what we are, 
What life is — , etc. 

That the psychic life of nature is merely 
projected into nature dramatically by man is 
suggested by Browning with a clearness which 
ought to satisfy even so disenchanted a critic 
of Bergson as Mr. Santayana, who appears to 
see in this philosopher little more than a 
" literary psychologist " : 

Not alone 
For their possessor dawn those qualities, 
But the new glory mixes with the heaven 
And earth; man, once descried, imprints forever 
His presence on all lifeless things: the winds 
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, 
A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, 
Never a senseless gust now man is born. 



True Method of Metaphysics 81 

The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts, 

A secret they assemble to discuss 

When the sun drops behind their trunks which 

glare 
Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat 
Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph 
Swims bearing high above her head: no bird 
Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above 
That let light in upon the gloomy woods, 
A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top, 
Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye. 
The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops 
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour, 
Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn 
Beneath the warm moon like a happy face: 

and so on. 

The passage is too long for citation in extenso, 
but the reader may be interested to turn to it 
and read it in full for a masterly illustration of 
an animism such as Bergson seems to advocate. 
This is of course not offered as an isolated in- 
stance of its kind, as nature personification, in 
its various types and grades, is one of the most 
common devices employed by the literary artist. 
That the act of intuition is a difficult one is for 
Bergson beyond doubt, and he often insists upon 
it. One cannot read the Introduction, for ex- 
ample, in which Bergson often reiterates the dif- 
ficulty of intuition, and ever confuse it again 
with the process of simple sense perception, as 
James seems to do. 



82 Henri Bergson 

The coarse necessity of living and acting, as 
Bergson somewhere puts it, and the intellectual 
instrumentalities made necessary thereby, have 
accustomed us to a certain side-by-sideness of 
things, a certain crust or covering of spatial 
framework, which has all but ruined our sight 
for the inner unity of life, the intention of life in 
its living wholeness. 

Intuition in man is but vague and intermit- 
tent. " It is a lamp almost extinguished, which 
glimmers only now and then, for a few moments 
at most. But it glimmers wherever a vital in- 
terest is at stake. On our personality, on our 
liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of 
nature, on our origin and perhaps also on our 
destiny, it throws a light feeble and vacillating, 
but which none the less pierces the darkness of 
the night in which the intellect leaves us." 
These fleeting intuitions, which now light up 
their object only at distant intervals, philosophy 
ought to seize upon, to sustain, to expand, and 
at last unite. The more it advances, the more 
clearly will it see that intuition is mind itself, 
and, in a certain sense, life itself. 



X 

OF EVOLUTION AND CREATION 



OF EVOLUTION AN3> CREATION 

We have now sketched roughly the ground- 
work of Bergson's system, upon which, as we 
said, much else depends. It will be possible to 
indicate only briefly, in conclusion, a few of the 
main metaphysical positions which seem to result 
from the general view Bergson takes of the na- 
ture of intellectual knowledge, and from that 
more intimate view of the inwardness of nature 
which intuition affords. 

The three theories of Bergson which will likely 
prove of most general interest are his theories 
of evolution, of the existence in nature of de- 
sign, and of the freedom of the will. Let us 
take these problems up in their order. 

One of the difficult points in the interpretation 
of Bergson's system is to ascertain the precise 
status of matter in the universe. In spite of the 
universal animism which Bergson often appears 
to teach, we find him throwing mind and matter 
into rather sharp opposition, as if they were two 
entirely discrepant and non-equitable principles, 
like oil and water, which will mingle but not mix. 
85 



86 Henri Bergson 

It is rather important to call attention to this 
point here, for evolution seems to be largely the 
outcome of an incessant struggle between these 
two fundamental forces. Life seems to be the 
active principle, and matter a refractory some- 
thing, a sort of weight or foil, with which life has 
to keep up an incessant struggle. The life force 
at the bottom of all evolution might be compared 
with the energy of a burning rocket which raises 
it through the air, while matter might be likened 
to the rocket itself, whose inertia has constantly 
to be overcome, and which falls to the earth 
again as soon as the force inside it has become 
sufficiently weak, or has spent itself. Life is in 
one place summarily described as a tendency to 
act on inert matter. Intelligence and instinct 
are said to be, at an early stage of evolution, 
" prisoners of a matter which they are not yet 
able to control." Elsewhere Bergson speaks of 
human action being exercised on matter, of our 
being able to act only with inert matter for an 
instrument, of the movement of life being " up," 
while the movement of matter is an inverse 
movement, an " undivided movement of descent," 
and so on. 

Whether the notion of matter as a substance 
entirely disparate from life is really consonant 
with the rest of Bergson's system, or whether it 
is intrinsically intelligible, it does serve a rather 
important dialectical purpose here because it 



Of Evolution and Creation 87 

tends to throw into clear relief another idea 
which is of capital importance for any theory of 
evolution that is to prove at all satisfactory. 

This is the notion of the vital impulse, the elan 
vital, a sort of tension or inner urgency which is 
the real driving force of evolution, the power be- 
hind the whole of things, without which there 
could be no change or development at all. 

In order to bring out the full significance of 
this principle, let us contrast Bergson's view of 
evolution with the reigning natural science the- 
ory of it (let us call it the hangman theory, for 
short) according to which the prevalence of 
efficient forms of animal life, for example, to- 
gether with all the delicate adaptations existing 
in nature, are explained by the destructive effect 
of the environment acting mechanically upon the 
poorly adapted or unfit forms. Thus nature 
will exercise a " preferential selection " of animal 
forms, say, equipped with good protective cov- 
ering, with organs of defence, like horns or 
claws, with fleetness of foot, ferocity, endurance, 
sensory acuteness, and other such features hav- 
ing " survival value." Nature stands by, like an 
executioner, ready to cut down such forms as 
are not able, on account of their inferior equip- 
ment, to maintain themselves. 

Thus, through the action of " natural selec- 
tion," the fittest always survive, and tend to 
transmit, through heredity, their valuable traits 



88 Henri Bergson 

to their offspring. In this way the gradual im- 
provement which seems to be taking place in all 
departments of nature and life is said to be com- 
pletely explained. 

""" Two points are worthy of notice. One is that 
the factors involved in bringing about change 
or evolution, namely natural selection and hered- 
ity, are so-called natural factors, that is, they 
are blind or mechanical in their operation. In 
the second place, their activity is merely nega- 
tive and critical, not creative or productive : they 
merely destroy ill-adapted forms, and at most 
maintain those which happen to be well ad- 
justed to the conditions under which they are to 
exist. Their function, if we may say so, is not 
productive, but only permissive. 

Well, it does not take an unusual power of re- 
flection to see that a purely critical and destruc- 
tive agency cannot account for the continual 
origination of things, although it may very 
well account for their survival after they have 
once come into existence. It is plain that in 
order for an executioner to have employment he 
must have subjects. In order for the forces of 
nature to eliminate forms, there must be forms 
to eliminate — there must be a tendency on the 
part of nature to produce organisms and varia- 
tions before the environment can begin its se- 
lective and destructive industry. But this 



Of Evolution and Creation 89 

point, important as it is, seems to be rather neg- 
lected by current evolution theories. 

Science has of course often noticed the redund- 
ancy of nature from whose prolific lap spring 
countless forms of life, so many, indeed, as 
often to be unable to maintain themselves on the 
limited means of subsistence which nature af- 
fords, like parents who bring more children into 
the world than they are able decently to rear. 
But the very thing which science presupposes or 
treats as negligible has been thought by philoso- 
phers to be of first-rate importance for a theory 
of the universe, and many of them, including 
Bergson himself, have raised what seemed to 
many an unimportant point into a central prin- 
ciple. 1 The most fundamental tendency of na- 

1 Science has indeed been sufficiently troubled by such 
phenomena as discontinuous variation, of regeneration, 
repair, of growth through exercise, and the like, which 
not only are not explained by natural selection, but which 
even suggest a creative principle and the existence of 
purpose in nature. The hope of science, however, has 
always been to bring these phenomena under the domi- 
nation of purely mechanistic hypotheses. Read, for ex- 
ample, Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment, 
especially Chapter VIII. After some consideration of 
the anomalous phenomena above referred to, Mr. Hen- 
derson concludes: "To sum up, it appears certain that 
at least in a few instances, and possibly quite generally, 
purposeful tendencies exist in the organism which seem 
to be inexplicable by natural selection or any other ex- 
isting mechanistic hypothesis. It is not too much to 
hope that a scientific explanation of these phenomena in 



90 Henri Bergson 

ture, and that which is after all the most in- 
teresting for our view of the universe, is not 
the tendency to cut off and destroy, but to 
form and create. 

The notion of variation as intrinsically a form 
of self-expression on the part of the organism 
itself has, of course, been often discussed since 
the days of Lamarck, Goethe and Chambers. It 
receives a brilliant corroboration from a fresh 
point of view to-day by Bergson. 

The living spring or thrust, which is nature at 
its deepest, the will to live and struggle, without 
which nature would be like a broken bow robbed 
of its resiliency, is perhaps most effectively illus- 
trated by the individual organism, whose sur- 
vival, as we well "know, depends not merely upon 
its environment, but upon itself. Its chances for 
life are good in direct proportion as it shows 
conative energy, as it is plucky and " quick on 
its feet." 

Paulsen has stated the whole case admirably : 
" The presupposition of all development, without 
which the above-mentioned principles (natural 
selection, etc.) would have no support for their 
activity is, of course, the will to live, the will to 
struggle for existence, common to all things 
taking part in evolution. They do not suffer 

whole or in part may some day be found; but mean- 
time they constitute the natural subject of vitalistic 
speculation." 



Of Evolution and Creation 91 

the development passively ; they are not, like the 
pebbles in the brook, pushed into a new form by 
mechanical causes acting from without. Their 
own activity is the absolute condition for the 
efficacy of natural selection. The struggle for 
existence is not imposed upon individuals from 
without ; it is their own will to fight the battle ; 
and without this will, the will to preserve and 
exercise individual life and produce and preserve 
offspring, there would be no such struggle for 
existence at all." 

Unless such a productive and active principle 
is presupposed, it does seem as if the process of 
evolution could never get going. Nature, like a 
vast engine with its power exhausted, would lie 
helpless and prone, a monstrous corpse from 
which every trace of life had fled, instead of 
being what she is, a thing pulsing with power 
and life, moving forward, with an inexhaustible 
energy and prolific vitality, through the count- 
less forms and phases which constitute the 
universe's eventful history. 

A leading characteristic of Bergson's theory 
of evolution, which seems to be in a way a corol- 
lary of the foregoing, is that evolution is a 
devenir reel, is genuinely creative, making real 
additions to the past and the present each puls- 
ing moment. Creation is not some mythical 
event enacted once for all at some mythical be- 
ginning of things, as represented by an outworn 



92 Henri Bergson 

theology, nor is it a mere shuffling of cards, an 
eternal redistribution of matter and energy, as 
pictured by an equally obsolete evolutionism. 
Evolution means the genuine elaboration of nov- 
elty, an actual augmentation of reality, in which 
fresh items of being, unprecedented features, 
spring constantly into existence. 

And there are no prophets ! There might be 
if history were merely the unwinding of a scheme 
of things once for all forged in the eternities. 
But it is not. Rather is it " a progress to ever 
new creations, to conclusions incommensurable 
with the premises and indeterminable by relation 
to them." Nature, like our own personality, 
" shoots, grows and ripens without ceasing." 
The future is not made, but in the making. It 
presents an infinity of unredeemed possibilities. 
Its unfolding constitutes true history. Man is 
not facing his destiny, but his opportunity. 



XI 

OF MECHANISM AND DESIGN 



XI 

OF MECHANISM AND DESIGN 

r A question which has often interested poets 
and philosophers is whether nature as a whole 
is purposive, whether there exists some 

One far-off divine event 

To4which the whole creation moves, 

or whether the events and processes of nature 
are blind, unaware, that is, of their tendency and 
objective, like a boulder, shed by some moon 
or star, which rushes through the vast reaches 
of space ignorant of itself, and ignorant of where 
and how its career is to eventuate. 

Bergson has briefly answered this question in a 
general way in a passage which has been already 
quoted in another connection. Neither mechan- 
ism nor finalism, he there said, would really fit 
evolution, but finalism " might be recut and re- 
sewn, and in the new form fit less badly than the 
other." 1 

i That the method by which one approaches the study 
of evolution will profoundly affect the classic alternative 
of mechanism and teleology is well illustrated by the 
95 



96 Henri Bergson 

That evolution is not purely mechanical, its 
results, Bergs on thinks, sufficiently show. The 
most convincing disproof of pure mechanism is 
the phenomenon of " convergence " in evolution, 
by which Bergson simply means the production 
of similar results by separate lines of develop- 
ment. The eyes of mollusks and vertebrates, for 
example, though very similar, have been de- 
veloped along different and independent lines of 

following passage from Professor Royce's The Spirit of 
Modern Philosophy (Lecture XII), in which he is elab- 
orating the pregnant distinction between the point of 
view of " description " and that of " appreciation," a dis- 
tinction which corresponds roughly to the Bergsonian 
one between scientific analysis and intuition : " An evo- 
lution is a series of events that in itself is purely phys- 
ical, — a set of necessary occurrences in the world of 
space and time. An egg develops into a chick; a poet 
grows up from infancy; a nation emerges from bar- 
barism; a planet condenses from the fluid state, and 
develops the life that for millions of years makes it so 
wondrous a place. Look upon all these things de- 
scriptively, and you shall see nothing but matter moving 
instant after instant, each instant containing in its full 
description the necessity of passing over into the next. 
Nowhere will there be, for descriptive science, any genu- 
ine novelty or any discontinuity admissible. But look 
at the whole appreciatively, historically, synthetically, as 
a musician listens to a symphony, as a spectator watches 
a drama. Now you shall seem to have seen, in phenome- 
nal form, a story. ... In taking such a view are you 
likely to be coming nearer to the inner truth of things? 
Yes; for the consciousness of the Logos must be one 
that essentially transcends our own temporal time-limi- 
tations; and in so far as we view sequences in their 
wholeness, we are therefore likely to be approaching the 
unity of his world-possessing insight." 



Of Mechanism and Design 07 

evolution, as if they were after all not due to 
accident, that mythical bearer of a thousand 
burdens, but were " made for seeing." The 
theory of mechanism would have to be abandoned 
for some form of teleology " if it could be proved 
that life may manufacture like apparatus by un- 
like means, on divergent lines of evolution ; " and 
the case for teleology would be strong in propor- 
tion to " the divergency between the lines of evo- 
lution thus chosen, and to the complexity of the 
similar structures found in them." 

But if nature is an artificer, she is a somewhat 
unpractised, bungling artificer, if one may 
judge by our human standards of valuation, 
which are the only ones accessible to us. There 
is many a miscarriage in nature, and many a 
blind alley, and abandoned path, eloquent sou- 
venirs at once of her prodigal methods and her 
unfailing resourcefulness. Evolution is, in 
fact, a species of improvisation, an experiment 
in creation on a vast scale, in which much sur- 
vives and is carried on, and much falls by the 
way. There seems to be, in any case, no sin- 
gle objective towards which nature moves, as it 
were, by the shortest road. Developments oc- 
cur along many divergent paths : evolution is 
not linear, but sheaf-like in its unfolding, as if 
there were not one goal, but many ; as if, at any 
rate, there were different ways of approach to 
the same ultimate destination. 

The two fundamental forms of psychical life, 



98 Henri Bergson 

instinct and intelligence, for example, do not 
represent successive stages of a linear develop- 
ment, but rather divergent courses which evo- 
lution has pursued. " The cardinal error," 
Bergson maintains, " which from Aristotle on- 
wards has vitiated most of the philosophies of 
nature is to see in vegetative, instinctive and 
rational life three successive degrees of the de- 
velopment of the same tendency, whereas they 
are three divergent directions of an activity 
that has split up as it grew." It has come 
about, in any case, that intellect and instinct 
have become pretty completely differentiated 
on different lines of evolution, " intellect," as 
Mr. Russell wittily says, " being mainly the 
misfortune of man, while instinct is seen at its 
best in ants, bees and Bergson ! " 

The truth is that nature is neither so blind 
nor so providential as the sharp alternatives 
developed in the heat of partisan controversies 
of an older day suggest. The powers of na- 
ture, as Browning has it, are 

Neither put forth blindly, nor controlled 
Calmly by perfect knowledge. 

Nature's progress is much like that of a missile 
hurled from the hand: we know that it is mov- 
ing and we know its general direction ; but what 
its eventual destination will be, no one can with 
any assurance predict. 



Of Mechanism and Design 99 

Thus is much of our wisdom concerning the 
ends of nature no better than foolishness. The 
purposes of God in nature, if they truly exist, 
are, by our human faculty, in the end unfathom- 
able. One thinks of the fine word of Santayana, 
speaking of Spinoza, that great teacher of the 
essential unsearchableness of the divine wisdom : 
" When people tell us that they have the key to 
all reality in their pockets, or in their hearts, 
that they know who made the world, and why. 
or know that everything is matter, or that 
everything is mind — then Spinoza's notion of 
the absolutely infinite, which included all pos- 
sibilities, may profitably arise before us. It 
will counsel us to say to those little gnostics, to 
those circumnavigators of being: I do not be- 
lieve you; God is great." 



XII 
THE FREEDOM OF MAN 



XII 

THE FBEEDOM OF MAN 

If evolution is genuinely creative, elaborat- 
ing new forms of reality unceasingly, it would 
seem as if the pulsations of our human will, 
when we strive, aspire and attain, might repre- 
sent the very birth-throbs by which new forms 
of life and reality were constantly being pro- 
duced. Our acts might then truly be turning 
places, as James splendidly puts it, where we 
catch reality in the making. 

That human acts are machine-made, many 
persons, turned scientists, have indeed asserted ; 
but that men really make history, and really 
" do things," the same scientists, when they turn 
men again, and relapse into their tender-minded 
state (or is it tough?) seldom have the hardi- 
hood to deny. 

The interminable controversy between the 
champions of free will and the champions of 
determinism, as is usually the case with such 
controversies, rests, according to Bergson, upon 
a fundamental misunderstanding, the same mis- 
understanding as that between empiricism and 
103 



104 Henri Bergson 

rationalism in their controversy regarding the 
existence of the soul. All parties make the in- 
itial blunder of starting with the mosaic ac- 
count of the mental life furnished by analytical 
psychology, an account which, as we know, sub- 
stitutes for the living, concrete self — the 
fundamental self, as Bergson calls it — a set of 
symbols, a phantom self, made up of a plurality 
of discrete mental " states," arranged in juxta- 
position, by the mechanical play and interplay 
of which all actions are to be explained. 

The psychologist, for example, speaks of 
sympathy, love, hate, etc., as though these were 
so many independent, isolated forces, whose 
several impulsive energies were somehow de- 
terminable, and from the resultant forces of 
which actions can be calculated. We are here 
simply imposed upon by a trick of language 
which denotes an infinite number of nuances by 
the same general name. For each of us has 
his own way of loving and hating: in fact each 
separate act of loving and hating is non-re- 
produceable, because its particular quality and 
colour are determined by the personality as a 
whole in the moment of emotional and impulsive 
stress, and the personality is never the same 
at any two successive instants. 

The failure to distinguish the concrete, funda- 
mental self from the artificial reconstruction 
of it which psychology gives us accounts for 



The Freedom of Man 105 

the invincible discrepancy between the " feel- 
ing " of freedom, and the scientific conviction 
of determinism. A dead-lock is indeed inevi- 
table here for the simple reason that one party 
is moving within the super-intellectual (Kant 
would have said the intelligible) realm, while 
the other is moving within the realm of the 
scientific understanding. But freedom can 
never be understood: it can only be lived. 

The type of determinism just discussed, in 
which action is supposed to be determined by 
the interaction of discrete mental states, might 
be called psychological or associationist deter- 
minism, as distinguished from physical deter- 
minism, according to which mental states are 
determined by brain states. Here again it 
must be remembered that the whole framework 
of interconnecting mental and brain states in 
parallel series is a conceptual construction, an 
hypothesis, which has never received, and, in 
the nature of the case, never can receive, em- 
pirical verification sufficiently extensive to give 
the parallelist view any other status than that 
of a working hypothesis. We do, indeed, have 
an apparent parallelism between certain ob- 
served members of the physical and the mental 
series within a limited range ; but to extend this 
parallelism to the two series in their totality 
would be to settle the whole problem of freedom 
in advance. 



106 Henri Bergson 

Bergson's view of the relation of the mind to 
the brain, which he has recently expressed, es- 
pecially in his lectures at the University of 
London, in fact entirely reverses the views of 
this relation which are commonly held. 

The brain is usually thought to furnish the 
physical conditions for the rise and reminis- 
cence of conscious experience. It is thought to 
be the place where memories are somehow stored 
and held in readiness to be recalled upon oc- 
casion. Memory in Bergson, however, is a 
purely psychical, disembodied faculty, the 
brain acting merely as a selective tool which 
permits only useful experiences to rise above 
the threshold of consciousness. 

The view that the brain does not produce 
consciousness, but merely transmits it, just as 
window glass merely transmits the daylight 
which already exists outdoors, has of course been 
exploited by James in the interest of immortal- 
ity in his well-known little book called by that 
name. In Bergson, too, the brain's function is 
merely transmissive rather than productive. 
Just as light, heat or electricity cannot pass 
through matter by any path, but must take 
whatever route it can, whatever path it finds 
most pervious, so consciousness can express it- 
self only through such forms of matter as it 
finds pervious to the particular kind of energy 
which it represents. The brain might then be 



The Freedom of Man 107 

thought of as composed of a kind of matter 
fitted to act as the carrier of consciousness, a 
kind which, so to speak, consciousness can 
penetrate. 

The main significance of the brain in Berg- 
son, however, is not derived from the fact that 
it transmits ideas, but from the fact that it 
fails to do so! So far from the brain's being 
an organ of reminiscence, it is rather an organ 
of oblivion ! It acts as a sort of mask or screen 
which shuts the great mass of our ideas from 
view. The purpose of ideas and experiences, 
it must be remembered, is the guidance of ac- 
tion. But in order that action may be ef- 
fective, only such ideas must be recalled as are 
relevant to the situation or the problem to- 
wards which action is pointed. Without the 
intervention of the brain the flow of ideas 
would be so copious as to paralyse action. 
Hamlet's inability to act might thus be ex- 
plained as a lack of cerebral inhibition, result- 
ing in an exuberance of mentation which liter- 
ally paralysed the will. 

But we cannot follow these interesting psy- 
chophysical speculations further. Let us go 
straight to our point. Is man truly free in his 
actions, or is he determined? Bergson would, 
I think, answer, Neither! For the old notion 
of freedom, on the one hand, and of determina- 
tion, on the other, Bergson would substitute 



108 Henri Bergson 

the compromise conception of self-determina- 
tion, a conception indeed well domesticated in 
modern psychology and philosophy, but given a 
fresh prestige through the sanction of our 
philosopher. No act is indeed free in the sense 
that it is completely uncoupled from the mental 
life of the man with whom it originates. Man 
can be free, however, in the sense that he can 
be self-determined, that his act can be deter- 
mined by the nature of the self of which the act 
is the expression. If freedom is thus defined, 
there will evidently be degrees of freedom. 
Freedom will be complete only where the funda- 
mental self (not the self of psychology) acts in 
its entirety, where the whole of consciousness 
is concerned in the act. 

Most of us, of course, do not have the sym- 
metry and wholeness of mind required for per- 
fect freedom. An incompletely integrated mass 
of ideas, impulses and feelings, the mind tends 
always to act locally, so to speak; a single 
idea, as in hypnotic suggestion, tends to set up 
for itself and to usurp the place rightfully be- 
longing to the self as a whole. Similarly, a 
hereditary vice, an eccentric impulse, or a habit 
will so dominate the rest of the personality as 
to make true freedom impossible. Thus, says 
Bergson in a splendid passage in Time and Free 
Willy " many live this kind of life, and die with- 
out having known true freedom. But sug- 



The Freedom of Man 109 

gestion would become persuasion if the entire 
self assimilated it; passion, even sudden pas- 
sion, would no longer bear the stamp of fatal- 
ity if the whole history of the person were 
reflected in it, as in the indignation of Alceste; 
and the most authoritative education would not 
curtail any of our freedom if it only imparted 
to us ideas and feelings capable of impregnat- 
ing the whole soul. It is the whole soul, in fact, 
which gives rise to the free decision: and the 
act will be so much the freer the more the 
dynamic series with which it is connected tends 
to be the fundamental self." * 

iThe summary of Bergson's doctrine of freedom 
which I have attempted in the above section does not, 
according to a criticism which I have received from Mr. 
Love joy, adequately represent Bergson's argument as set 
out in Chapter III of Time and Free Will. " That argu- 
ment" (I quote Mr. Lovejoy's memorandum in full) 
" rests chiefly upon Bergson's conception of duration and 
of consciousness as memory. Every moment of duration 
is new. And since we carry all our past along with us, in 
pure memory, then at every fresh moment of my experience 
I am an unprecedented complex — I consist of all that I 
have been phis the new moment's increment of being. 
Therefore, my action at each moment is free in the sense 
that it is the unique expression of an unprecedented 
being's action — it cannot be assimilated to my past or 
reduced to any law that can be learned from any uni- 
formities of my past action." I am very glad to quote 
this criticism as it brings out clearly what I myself 
omitted to emphasise in the present context (although 
the matter is touched upon elsewhere in my discussion), 
namely the enormous scope of the self s history which 
is brought to bear upon the present act, implied in Berg- 



110 Henri Bergson 

son's doctrine of pure memory, or of the eternal dura- 
bility of any experience. The critical point of Berg- 
son's argument, however, still seems to me to be the 
contention that determinism is bound up with the mosaic 
representation of the mind of the older associationist 
psychology, according to which an act is merely the re- 
sultant of the interplay of " ideas " after the manner 
of the interaction of forces in mechanical physics. 
The act of the mind, however, is a true " schopferische 
Synthese," an original or creative resultant, and is hence 
unpredictable. Indeed, unless this line of argument is 
followed, you yield the whole case to the determinist, 
as, according to him, too, the present is merely an issue 
of the past 



XIII 
RETROSPECT AND SUMMARY 



XIII 

RETROSPECT AND SUMMARY 

It will be well to summarise at this point 
the salient ideas of Bergson's philosophy, at 
least in so far as we have been able to outline 
them in the foregoing sketch. 

The most prominent aspect of Bergson's 
system, the aspect which is of the utmost sig- 
nificance for many of the concrete problems of 
reality and of life, is his criticism of intellec- 
tual knowledge. Such knowledge does not give 
us reality as it is; it transmutes reality into a 
set of symbols which are useful for the guidance 
of action, but which have no metaphysical sig- 
nificance. 

If philosophy is to become a true metaphysic, 
it must relinquish the method of analysis for 
that of intuition. The mind must place itself 
into a living relation with its object; it must, 
for the time, become the object through the ex- 
ercise of intellectual sympathy. Thus alone 
will it be enabled to follow the creative move- 
ment through its inner mazes and sinuosities, 

and to grasp it in its living wholeness, instead 
113 



114 Henri Bergson 

of seeing it as so many things or states, which 
are only the intellect's stationary views of be- 
coming. 

The method of intuition, as might have been 
anticipated, will yield very different results from 
those of scientific intellection. In psychology 
it will reveal the soul to be the indivisible flux 
of our inner life as we actually live it, instead 
of a collection of discrete states, or the ab- 
stract unity of these states. Both the states 
and the unity are static concepts which have 
been scissored out of the concrete flow of the 
inner life, and have no metaphysical signifi- 
cance whatever. Similarly, in the world of 
matter, our practical interests break up the 
continuum of the material universe into an ag- 
gregate of atoms, bodies, classes, etc., together 
with their shifting relations ; the true reality of 
things, their unceasing mobility, it treats as 
adventitious ; motion is viewed as a function of 
rest, etc. Here, too, we must proceed by in- 
tuition. The mind must take up its stand 
within the stream of becoming. It must live 
reality instead of analysing it. 

How this is possible we found it rather dif- 
ficult to make clear. The process of intuition 
seems here to involve an ascription to nature of 
a life like our own, thus establishing an inner 
affinity between the mind and its object, be- 
tween man and nature. The Leibnizian no- 



Retrospect and Summary 115 

tion of the fundamental resemblance between 
the structure and life of all items of reality, of 
the flower and the wall, of man and God, seems 
to be in mind here. The philosopher must 
cease to be analyst and become artist. His 
activity must become sympathetic and apprecia- 
tive, rather than analytical and descriptive. 

The abandonment of the atomic idea of the 
universe, a fabrication of the scientific intellect, 
and the substitution therefor of the notion of the 
universe as a living unity will necessitate a 
radical revision of many philosophical doc- 
trines whose character was determined through- 
out by the scientific conceptions upon which 
they were based. 

Evolution does not consist in an eternal 
redistribution of self-identical elements, as an 
obsolescent system of cosmical mechanics pre- 
sented it, but is a genuine growth. Nor is 
evolution fully explained by the critical and 
destructive action of the environment, as re- 
presented by an equally inadequate biology. 
The most profound aspect of nature is not its 
tendency to cut off and destroy, but to elabo- 
rate and produce. Furthermore, evolution is 
not a mere re-shifting, with nothing added and 
nothing taken away. It is a genuine creation. 
It proceeds by true increments, unceasingly 
elaborating unprecedented novelties and fresh 
features of reality as it proceeds. 



116 Henri Bergson 

In the second place, if we relinquish the 
method of abstract analysis for that of intui- 
tion, we shall cease to regard the universe as a 
mechanism which grinds out results blindly 
through the operation of those mythical powers 
called laws of nature. A mechanism implies 
the conception of nature as an aggregate of 
static entities whose relation to one another is 
external rather than organic — a framework 
which bears unmistakable evidence of the trans- 
forming activity of the scientific intellect. The 
telic character of the universe is beyond ques- 
tion, though the purposes in nature are not so 
clearly anticipated nor so consistently striven for 
as the older theories of design often suggested. 

Finally, if we reject the mosaic view of con- 
sciousness presented to us by associationist 
psychology, as we must reject it, then we must 
cease to think of human action as being deter- 
mined by forces which are somehow alien to 
it. The will is free in the only significant sense 
of freedom. It is of course not a faculty by 
itself, uncoupled from the rest of the mental 
life, nor need it be in order for true freedom 
to be realised. True freedom exists when the 
act is the expression of the self in its entirety. 
Such freedom is of course in the beginning 
merely ideal, but it is realised more and more 
completely as the self achieves unity of life with 
the progress of spiritual culture. 



XIV 

CRITICISM OF BERGSON: THE DOC- 
TRINE OF PURE CHANGE 



XIV 

CRITICISM or bergson: the doctrine of 

PURE CHANGE 

It would carry us quite beyond the limits 
of our task to undertake a criticism of Berg- 
son's philosophy in detail, or to examine ex- 
haustively any one of his ideas. Let us single 
out, therefore, the two doctrines which are un- 
questionably the most fundamental and striking 
in his system, the doctrine of the static con- 
cept, and the doctrine of pure change. Take 
the last first. 

Bergson represents reality as a process of 
pure change. It is doubtful, however, whether 
the idea of pure change is one which we can 
make very intelligible to ourselves. That the 
notion is a difficult one the whole history of 
philosophy proves. The idea of reality as 
something partially or wholly permanent, as 
somehow substantial, pervades the entire history 
of philosophical speculation from the earliest 
Greek physicists down. In the first philoso- 
phers of Greece whose names and teachings 

have been preserved to history we already meet 
119 



120 Henri Bergson 

the attempt to explain the variety presented 
by the physical universe as somehow due to the 
mutation of some single element or substance, 
water, air, fire, and the like. Empedocles, 
Democritus and his followers, the so-called 
Greek atomists, explained change as consisting 
in the altered combinations and re-grouping 
of primitively simple elements. Plato con- 
trasted the world of appearance with the world 
of eternal forms or ideas, each mundane ap- 
pearance being but a sort of shadow or imper- 
fect copy of its divine original. And Aristotle, 
so modern in many of his phases, finds unity 
and self-identity in the plan or function re- 
vealed in the details of structure and activity 
which a thing manifests. And so philosophers 
and theologians of the middle ages with their 
creation and emanation theories, the modern 
philosophers with their distinction between sub- 
stance and attributes, the soul and its states, 
the thing-in-itself and phenomena, reality and 
appearance, the permanent possibilities of sen- 
sations and the sensations themselves, matter 
and its properties, the absolute and its finite 
manifestations, all alike bear witness to the in- 
sistent tendency to posit behind the fleeting ap- 
pearance and show of the world a background 
of unalterable essence. Is this persistent tend- 
ency justified, or is it possible to conceive of 
nature as a process of absolute change without 



Criticism of Bergson 121 

any background of permanence at all as Berg- 
son invites us to do? 

Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale; 
Alles ist sie mit einem Male! 

The thesis which I should like here to sug- 
gest and support is that the notions of per- 
manence and change are entirely correlative in 
their significance and implications, and that the 
movements of nature always show difference 
within an underlying identity, and that pure 
change, strictly taken, is entirely inconceivable. 

Take even so inherently and incessantly 
mutable a thing as the stream of our conscious- 
ness. In spite of the fact that the changes 
going on within my consciousness are incessant 
and inevitable, I am still able to say that it is 
my consciousness which is undergoing change, 
that it is I who am experiencing the various 
mutations which my inner life suffers. Indeed, 
as Professor Taylor remarks, it is just " be- 
cause the self which changes with the flux of 
time and circumstances is still in some measure 
the same old self that we feel its changes to be 
so replete with matter for exultation and 
despair." 

It would, in fact, be an embarrassing ques- 
tion to ask a follower of Bergson whether, and 
by what means, pure change would be recognised 
as change. The movement of a body, for ex- 



122 Henri Bergson 

ample, can be recognised only if viewed on a 
background of stationary objects, or by re- 
ference to a fixed point from which or towards 
which the movement is taking place. " A mere 
succession," as Professor Taylor says, " of en- 
tirely disconnected contents held together by 
no common permanent nature persisting in 
spite of the transition would not be change at 
all. If I simply have before me first A and 
then B, A and B being absolutely devoid of any 
point of community, there is no sense in saying 
that I have apprehended a process of change." 
And so with any instance of change whatsoever. 
In order for it to be known as change it must 
be viewed on the background of something which 
remains identical throughout the successive 
stages or phases of the change. 

In what, precisely, the underlying identity in 
a given case of change consists it is at first dif- 
ficult enough to say. This is particularly true 
of the fluctuations of our inner psychical life 
which are so rapid and radical as to have led 
many to abandon the whole idea of the mind's 
unity, and to interpret it as a mere aggregate 
of changing nuances or phases. Hence the gen- 
eral " Entseelung " of German philosophical 
speculation and the " soulless " psychology 
about which in England and America there has 
been so much noise. The problem is, however, 
not a hopeless one, and much has already been 



Criticism of Bergson 123 

done to bring us within sight of a fairly satis- 
factory solution of it. Let us merely indicate 
one or two of the principal points. 

The identity within the change has been held 
to consist either in the form of elements which 
remain sensibly constant in the midst of their 
changing concomitants, or in the shape of an 
interest or purpose which remains identical 
throughout the process of change. The 
various events constituting the change are but 
so many steps or stages in the realisation of 
an underlying interest or purpose. The 
former system might be said to possess struc- 
tural or qualitative unity, the latter teleolog- 
ical unity, a unity of persistent interest or pur- 
pose. 

The self appears to have both these kinds of 
unity within it. In the first place, many of the 
contents of the mental life recur — we can 
"mean" the same objects by successive 
thoughts, that is, we have memory. Iden- 
tically the same thought does not, indeed, recur ; 
but, on the other hand, the thought, if it really 
concerns or intends the same object, cannot be 
wholly different. The other kind of unity 
which thought and the whole inner life pos- 
sesses is the teleological unity referred to above, 
the unity imparted to it by the purposes, ends 
or interests which the mental life appears to 
be striving to fulfil. The selective activity of 



124 Henri Bergson 

attention along the mind's current interests, 
and the processes of topical or purposively con- 
trolled thought, are typical examples of the 
telic unity of the inner life referred to. 

There is reason to believe that both these 
kinds of unity are eventually reducible to a 
single type, the type of functional unity, the 
unity of a fundamental principle or law accord- 
ing to which the successive stages of the change 
give way to each other. But the matter is 
perhaps too technical to go into very fully here. 

It is safe to say, in any case, that any pro- 
cess of change will be found, when closely ex- 
amined, to contain some perduring principle of 
unity or self-identity. The only cases in which 
change is indiscernible are (1) where nothing 
changes, and (£) where everything changes. 
Indeed, if Bergson's view of reality as pure 
change were true, we should never know it to be 
true. For the " change " would not be re- 
cognisable as change. We should at most have 
a succession of unrelated particulars which 
would affect us merely as so many separate 
impressions or shocks, as it were, but which we 
should be unable to bind together on the basis 
of any pervasive similarity, or of any under- 
lying principle or law. 

So far, therefore, from science and intel- 
ligence " drawing the dynamic unity out of na- 
ture as you draw the thread out of a string of 



Criticism of Bergson 125 

beads," it is rather true that experience would 
fall to pieces, that reality and change itself 
would crumble under our hands, if it were not 
for the unities within experience, those repeti- 
tive and relational features which the intellect 
discerns and holds fast throughout the succes- 
sive mutations which so deeply affect it. Our 
criticism may be summed up in one word: If 
there is to be change, there must be things to 
change. 

That something shall persist through the suc- 
cessive mutations which reality undergoes seems 
indeed to be absolutely demanded by other parts 
of Bergson's system. That change is never so 
radical as to involve the complete destruction 
of its object is, strange to say, one of the most 
characteristic ideas of this advocate of universal 
flux. The doctrine of universal mutation ap- 
pears, in fact, as only one side of a profound 
(and one fears unpremeditated) paradox which 
lies deeply imbedded in the Bergsonian philo- 
sophy. Side by side with the doctrine of uni- 
versal mutation we have what seems to be the 
precise opposite of it, the notion, namely, of 
universal conservation. The universe is not 
merely a " conservative system " in the sense of 
a mechanistic cosmology founded upon the 
principle of the conservation of energy, a sys- 
tem which knows neither diminution nor gain; 
it is actually creative, a continual becoming or 



126 Henri Bergson 

achievement, in which nothing is ever abandoned 
and nothing lost. According to the definition 
of consciousness as memory, for example, pres- 
ent experience sums up in itself, drags behind it, 
as it were, the whole of the self's history. It 
is upon this idea, indeed, that a number of 
Bergson's best-known doctrines, both in the 
philosophy of nature and in the philosophy of 
mind, such as the doctrines of creative evolu- 
tion, of indeterminate teleology and of the free- 
dom of the will, are based. The subjugation of 
this and other internal difficulties of Bergson's 
system seems still to belong to the future. 



XV 

CRITICISM OF BERGSON: THE DOC- 
TRINE OF THE STATIC CONCEPT 



XV 



CRITICISM OF bergson: the doctrine 

OF THE STATIC CONCEPT 

The second fundamental doctrine underlying 
Bergson's polemic against the scientific intel- 
lect is the doctrine of the stationary concept. 

Reality, Bergson has argued, is incessantly 
wearing and changing, but the concepts by which 
the intellect seeks to represent reality are static 
structures, unaffected by the flight of change 
and time. Hence Bergson's insistence on the 
inadequacy of scientific knowledge to give us 
insight into the true nature of what is real. 
We were concerned in the last section to throw 
doubt upon the validity of Bergson's first as- 
sertion, the assertion that nature is pure change. 
It is the object of the present section to sug- 
gest that his other main doctrine, the doctrine 
of the stationary concept, is at least equally 
doubtful. 

The doctrine of the static concept was ad- 
vocated by no less a psychologist than James, 
although it would not be difficult to cite passages 
from his works which are entirely irreconcilable 
with the idea. " Each conception," he wrote 

in the Principles of Psychology, " eternallv re- 
129 



180 Henri Bergson 

mains what it is, and never can become another. 
. . . Thus, amid the flux of opinions and phys- 
ical things, the world of conceptions, or things 
intended to be thought about, stands stiff and 
immutable, like Plato's Realm of Ideas." And 
again, in his Some Problems of Philosophy : 
" Particular facts decay and our conceptions of 
them vary. A concept never varies ; and be- 
tween such unvarying terms the relations must 
be constant and express eternal verities." If 
this view is a true one, then, of course, concepts 
cannot represent the living movements of 
nature. To understand life by concepts would 
indeed be, as James and Bergson maintain, " to 
arrest its movement, cutting it up into bits as 
if with scissors, and immobilising these in our 
logical herbarium where, comparing them as 
dried specimens, we can ascertain which of them 
statically includes or excludes which other." 

Well, that words change their meanings, and 
that the concepts of science and of daily life 
are constantly being overhauled and revised is 
one of the most familiar of facts. The classes, 
species, laws, hypotheses, systems, in fact, the 
whole framework of science, undergo constant 
modification as discrepancies between the ob- 
served facts of nature and the conceptual con- 
structions of science make themselves felt. In- 
deed, the Platonic doctrine of the independence 
of concepts and their eternal stability strikes 



Criticism of Bergson 131 

one as nothing less than superstitious, and 
there are reasons to suppose that it has been 
pretty generally abandoned for a more con- 
servative position. The reign of purely formal 
logic whose concepts and processes are entirely 
independent of the material of thought has been 
thoroughly broken, and its authority hopelessly 
discredited. But it is precisely against the 
Platonic theory of concepts, as it seems to me, 
and the scholastic exercise of manipulating con- 
cepts according to the formal rules of logic, 
that the polemic of Bergson and James is ex- 
clusively directed. 

If concepts are truly immutable and eternal, 
it is clear that they are utterly unable to re- 
present a world in which change is such a 
pervasive and deep-running characteristic. 
But what if concepts are corrigible and end- 
lessly flexible and thus delicately adaptable to 
the realities to which they refer? Thoughts 
and meanings are not stiff and unchangeable: 
they are the most mobile, sensitive and yielding 
things we know. 

Indeed, if there is any difference between 
sense knowledge and conceptual thought in this 
regard, it may be justly urged that it is sense 
experience which represents reality as immobile 
and discrete. Common sense, based upon naive 
sense experience, sees celestial bodies as station- 
ary and independent of each other. Science 



132 Henri Bergson 

knows them to be in constant movement, and 
held together bj energetic relations, the laws of 
gravity, so-called, which penetrate the utter- 
most reaches of the physical universe. It may 
indeed be urged that it is the work of scientific 
intelligence to remove the apparent heterogen- 
eity, to overcome the discretions, which naive 
experience presents. This was in fact the 
fundamental thought of Kant, according to 
whom the " Durcheinander," the natural chaos 
of primordial sense experience, is ordered and 
organised through the synthetic activity of the 
understanding. " Die Verbindung eines Man- 
nigfaltigen kann iiberhaupt niemals durch 
Sinne in uns kommen. . . . Alle Verbindung ist 
eine Verstandeshandlung." The same view is 
aptly stated by Professor Hibben who has the 
Bergsonian doctrine of the concept particularly 
in mind : " The charge is made against con- 
ceptual thinking that it cannot portray the 
continuous. On the contrary, it is the peculiar 
function of thought to represent the continu- 
ous. Our perceptual intelligence sees things in 
fragments: our conceptual thought integrates 
them into a continuous whole. I may not be 
able to see a process, but I can think it. . . . 
While conceptual thought possesses the analyti- 
cal power of separating a given process into ele- 
mental parts, into discrete portions of space, or 
separate instants of time, it must not be over- 
looked that it functions also in a synthetic 



Criticism of Bergson 133 

capacity, by means of which the connecting 
lines of continuity are established so that the 
mind can hold together the elements in one 
undivided whole." 

The pragmatic reference of a concept to its 
perceptual consequences, when we act upon it, 
in order to prove its validity, seems to be sim- 
ply another proof of its vital connection with 
the perceptual order. Its " truth " will be 
shown in its leading. If it leads to perceptual 
consequences which it was expected to lead to, 
it is true; if it does not so lead, its validity lies 
shattered. Both in their origin and in their 
leading, therefore, the conceptual order is in- 
terrelated with the perceptual. Concepts, as 
James says, are originally distilled from parts 
of percepts ; with them we return again into the 
flux in order to guide our reactions upon it. 

A leading difficulty of the Bergsonian system 
is that the results of intuition are incommuni- 
cable. If the results of intuition are to be 
made available socially they must first be trans- 
lated into the articulate forms of intelligence. 
Thus the dissolution of intuitive experience 
would seem to be necessary both for purposes 
of action and of communication. The results 
of dumb intuition, in other words, seem, on 
Bergson's showing, to have no other value than 
to satisfy the metaphysical interests and crav- 
ings of the individual knower. If true know- 
ledge is indeed incommunicable in the nature of 



134 Henri Bergson 

things, then Bergson himself writes and reasons 
in vain. The most definitive refutation of Berg- 
son's system would thus be given by Bergson 
himself in four volumes ! 

These strictures must not, however, cause us 
to overlook or to underestimate the great serv- 
ices of Bergson to the cause of philosophy. It 
is always the tendency of a conceptual system 
to become detached from the perceptual order 
in which it originates, and in which alone it 
finds its justification. Furthermore, it is imme- 
diate experience to which we must go for our 
" acquaintance with " anything whatsoever. 
Words by themselves have no meaning. Their 
meanings are validated wholly by the realities 
to which they refer. They are by themselves 
mere symbols, and what they symbolise will of 
course be forever hidden from any one into 
whose experience the realities for which they 
stand have not entered immediately and first- 
hand. Against the worship of words and of 
concepts as metaphysical realities independent 
of the world of immediate experience, and 
against the mental manipulation of concepts 
according to the rules of formal logic, a fa- 
vourite exercise of scholastic intellectualism, 
Bergson's system will forever stand as a whole- 
some and timely corrective. 

A purely negative polemic is the most use- 
less of pursuits. I propose, therefore, (1) the 
substitution for Bergson's notion of pure 



Criticism of Bergson 135 

change of the notion of change within an un- 
derlying identity, of identity realised through 
difference; (2) for the notion of the static con- 
cept and the Platonic world of intemporal ideas 
I propose the notion of the adjustable or cor- 
rigible concept, a conceptual order subject to 
constant modification and reorganisation, so as 
to fit the undeniably mutable world of reality 
which it symbolises ; finally (3) for Bergson's in- 
tuition, which is often taken, properly or im- 
properly, as an equivalent of inarticulate feel- 
ing, I propose Royce's recent term " insight," 
meaning by insight " the experience of wholes 
rather than fragments," " the coherent view of 
many facts in some sort of unity." 

The organ of such insight is reason. A fun- 
damental error of Bergson's is that he views 
reason as synonymous with mere analysis, thus 
contrasting it with intuition, a non-analytical 
appreciation of the homogeneous flow which re- 
ality presents. But analysis is only a prepara- 
tory step in reasoning. Nor does the reasoner, 
if he knows his business, deny the essential unity 
of that which he may, for purposes of better 
understanding or of practical control, divide 
and analyse. If Bergson uses the term intuition 
as something more than the bare awareness of 
fact, as he often seems to do, the term may 
turn out to be the essential equivalent of the 
term reason or insight itself. For reason or in- 
sight, too, sees reality in its wholeness, and that 



136 Henri Bergson 

is why the scientist and the philosopher know 
the world as it is more truly and adequately 
than does the man in the street. 1 The fact is 
that analysis and intuition exist on every plane 
of cognitive apprehension. The man in the 
street does not refrain from analysis, only the 
analysis here is motived by very immediate and 
practical ends. Intuition, on the other hand, 
is exercised on the highest planes of the ra- 
tional intelligence, if we mean by intuition an 
insight into the true wholeness of things. Rea- 
son is synopsis, and the synoptic grasp will be 
the more adequate and penetrating the more 
analysis has done her perfect work. Reason- 
able experience, as Royce insists, can of course 
not dispense with " instinct, feeling, faith and 
the inarticulate intuitions. These are the basis 
upon which the genuine work of reason, the 
wider view of life, must be carried toward its 
fulfillment. For whoever is to comprehend the 
unities of life must first live." 

i Immediacy or concreteness of experience " may be 
due, as in the case of mere uninterpreted sensation, to 
the absence of reflective analysis of the given into its 
constituent aspects or elements. But it may also be 
due ... to the fusion at a higher level into a single 
directly apprehended whole of results originally won by 
the process of abstraction and reflection. There is an 
immediacy of experience which is below mediate re- 
flective knowledge, but there is also a higher immediacy 
which is above it." Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 
p. 32. 



XVI 

BERGSON AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
RELIGION— THE VALUE OF LIFE 



XVI 

BERGSON AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 

THE VALUE OF LIFE 

A question of deep interest to many persons 
is that of the bearing of any new or original 
system of philosophy like Bergson's upon cur- 
rent religious interests and ideas. A few words 
upon this point, therefore, at the end of our 
considerations, may not come amiss. 

It is very clear that if we are to consider 
this question at all intelligently or profitably we 
must first come to some sort of understanding 
as to just what we shall mean by religion. It 
is obvious, for example, that the question of the 
bearing of Bergson's teachings upon religion 
would have to be answered very differently in 
case we should identify religion with the dog- 
mas of traditional theology, and in case we 
should take a freer view of its nature and mean- 
ing. The effect of Bergson's philosophy upon 
the traditional dogmas of theology might be al- 
most wholly negative (unless, indeed, these dog- 
mas were interpreted very freely and symbol- 
ically), while it might strongly corroborate and 
139 



140 Henri Bergson 

support a religion defined more generously and 
vitally. 

The view of religion which we shall adopt for 
the present purpose is that it is based upon the 
belief in the permanence of goodness, upon the 
belief that the universe is so constituted as ever 
to prefer the good and to destroy the evil. 
Defined very shortly, we might say (using words 
of Secretan) that religion is the belief that per- 
fection is eternal, or, in words of my own (of 
which I am fond, in spite of their anthropo- 
morphic associations), it is the belief in love. 

Whether such a belief is possible for us is a 
question, it seems plain, which can be settled 
partly upon the basis of factual or empirical 
evidence, in spite of the suggestion of James 
and others that the question, if it is to be set- 
tled favourably to religion, must be removed 
out of the realm of factual demonstration to 
the realm of faith and practical endeavour. 
James' wholesale condemnation of the empirical 
order as morally ambiguous or even bad seems 
to me, indeed, somewhat overwrought and harsh. 
" Every phenomenon that we would praise 
there," he writes, " exists cheek by jowl with 
some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its 
religious effect upon the mind. Beauty and 
hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep 
house together in indissoluble partnership; and 



The Value of Life 141 

gradually there steals over us, instead of the old 
warm notion of a man-loving deity, that of an 
awful power that neither hates nor loves, but 
rolls all things together meaninglessly to a com- 
mon doom." I do not wish here to enter upon 
the question of the comparative amounts of good 
and evil in the world, the question of optimism 
and pessimism, viewed from a merely historical 
or descriptive point of view. I have presented 
the case for religion, i. e., for the belief in the 
preponderance of good, somewhat fully in my 
recent book, The Problem of Religion, where 
the reader will find my opinions and arguments, 
if he should care for them. It is of course 
clear, and it may be granted without further 
discussion, that the belief in the present pre- 
ponderance or the eventual triumph of good, 
while capable of much empirical support, is in 
the nature of the case not susceptible of com- 
plete empirical confirmation, which must for- 
ever remain a philosophical aspiration rather 
than a definite achievement. 

It is clear, however, and may readily be con- 
ceded, that the question of primary importance 
for religion is not whether the good is actually 
realised, but whether it is realisable in a world 
like this ; whether the progressive victory of 
good over evil, of reasonableness and aspiration 
over unreasonableness and fate and chance, is 



142 Henei Bergson 

something for which, in the actual constitution 
of the world, we may fairly hope for and work 
for. 

Moreover, and particularly, no moral evalua- 
tion of the universe can be regarded as at all 
adequate which leaves out of account man's 
active nature, which reckons up the chances of 
good and ill from the consideration of the phys- 
ical forces, merely, which the world represents, 
leaving out of account the efficacy of human 
aspiration, the active energy of human agents. 
James was right when he asserted that for any 
philosophy to succeed it must avoid two funda- 
mental defects: it must not in its ultimate prin- 
ciple baffle and disappoint our most cherished 
powers, and, second, it must not define the world 
in such a way as to give our active powers no 
"object whatever to press against. The two 
kinds of existence, in other words, which would 
be unendurable are that in which all problems 
are hopeless and all striving therefore vain, 
and that in which all problems are already 
solved. The real foe of religion, or of any 
hopeful interpretation of reality, is therefore 
not naturalism, as is so often asserted, but ab- 
solutism in every form, whether absolutism be 
of the naturalistic and mechanical type con- 
templated by physical science, or of the logical 
or teleological type of absolute idealism. Both 
systems leave man out of account; both deny 



The Value of Life 143 

what he feels to be the most inviolable part of 
his nature, his activity in the pursuit of his 
ends, the freedom and efficacy of his own life. 
If the question is asked, then, what, in a word, 
the constitution of the world would be which the 
moral nature of man can approve, in which 
trust and aspiration are appropriate moods, 
rather than fear and despair, the answer would 
be that it must be a world in which human ends 
can be truly achieved, though not without ef- 
fort, struggle and perhaps much pain. 

We are now fairly in position to estimate the 
bearing of Bergson's system upon any world- 
view which can be called religious. The three 
salient doctrines of Bergson's which have rele- 
vancy in the present connection are the doc- 
trines of creative evolution, of indeterminate 
teleology, and of human freedom. They will 
be seen, when they are examined from our pres- 
ent point of view, to be broadly in keeping with 
a view of the world upon which, as we have held, 
religion depends. A few words upon each 
point will perhaps make the matter clear. 

(1) The view of evolution as creative pro- 
vides for novelty in the world, and for the ap- 
pearance of features, therefore, which, though 
not actually existent, are ideally demanded. It 
denies mechanistic naturalism which views na- 
ture as a closed system whose changes are due, 
not to the efficacy of ideals and intelligent en- 



144 Henri Bergson 

deavour, but to the shifting and reshifting of 
forces in accordance with mechanical forces 
working blindly. Evolution, according to 
Bergson, is not a mere rethreshing of old straw, 
an eternal redistribution of matter and energy. 
Evolution, rather, is elaboration, production, a 
process in which fresh items of reality spring 
constantly into existence. The theological doc- 
trine of creation is not only unassailable, it ex- 
presses the most central truth about the world 
which it is possible to utter. Traditional the- 
ology errs only in treating the act of creation 
as singular and final, and in referring it back to 
some mythical point in the past. Creation is 
not confined to the past : it is taking place con- 
tinually. 

That science should not recognise the cre- 
ative and spontaneous aspects of evolution, but 
should interpret it in purely mechanical terms, 
is entirely natural in view of the object which 
science has set for itself. If there is genuine 
spontaneity in the world, science, whose ideal is 
calculation and prediction, must ignore it, just 
as psychology must ignore free will, if such a 
thing indeed exists. We are here merely re- 
stating, from a somewhat different point of 
view, the central point of Bergson's whole criti- 
cism of science, a criticism which will doubtless 
stand the test of utmost scrutiny. The only 
true science, according to Bergson, would be 



The Value of Life 145 

history, the science which deals with the con- 
crete and the individual, rather than the ab- 
stract and conceptual. The unique and the 
individual, just because it is unique and indi- 
vidual, forever eludes the notional grasp. 

(2) But if Bergson's system is unfriendly 
to absolute creation theories, it is equally un- 
friendly to all forms of absolute teleology. If 
there is no absolute creation, in the sense of 
traditional theology, there is also no absolute 
predestination. The course of evolution is not 
mapped out, as it were, beforehand, so that no 
one, not even God, " can see the end from the 
beginning." The life of God himself lies be- 
fore him largely in the form of an unrealised 
possibility, like the life of the youth whose vast 
and ill-defined aspirations and impulses are 
symptomatic of certain energies and tendencies, 
without, however, affording any clear hint or 
sign of the final outcome of the great adventure 
of life which he confronts. 

Prophecy is therefore not so much a form of 
prognostication as a form of poetry. Its mes- 
sage is not primarily oracular, but normative 
and hortative. Its fictive utterances stir the 
imagination and the will, and thus bring events 
about through the release of human energies, 
rather than foretell, merely, a consummation 
which nature, left to herself, would have 
achieved. 



146 Henri Beegson 

(3) The whole of Bergson's philosophy, like 
the whole philosophy of religion, is thus seen to 
centre in freedom. The universe is a product 
of free creation simply because it is not force 
or mechanism, but freedom and life. The op- 
eration of freedom we witness first-hand in man, 
where the will liberates itself from the rule of 
matter and shapes life in conformity with its 
own ends and goals. 

That such freedom is not unlimited and does 
not operate capriciously and in independence 
of the order of nature is a point which cannot 
be emphasised too strongly. The charwomen, 
in Sir Oliver Lodge's illustration, who break 
into the scientist's laboratory and disturb his 
scientific results, upset no laws of nature in do- 
ing so. They disturb the results merely by dis- 
arranging the conditions which the scientist has 
carefully prepared. I can, by merely pressing 
a lever, switch a locomotive from one track to 
another, according to my will. I can even de- 
rail it entirely by placing an obstacle upon the 
track. But what I cannot do is to keep it from 
moving along the lines of least resistance. 
Thus, while I can side-track the engine, or even 
upset it, I cannot deviate or upset the laws of 
nature. It is of course clear on a very little 
thought that the only condition on which I can 
carry out the purposes of my will is by the use 
of agents, by relying upon the uniformity of 



The Value of Life 147 

nature without which all ends would become un- 
realisable, all purposes unfulfilled, and life it- 
self become a sheer impossibility. Indeed, the 
more one reflects on the matter the clearer it 
becomes that the constancy of nature is the one 
most important argument for theism which can 
be produced. That the ground is firm under 
our feet, that water slakes and fire burns, that 
bodies gravitate, that the sun rises and sets and 
the seasons recur — that nature, in short, U 
without shadow or turning — this is the one 
condition on which life can be good. 

It is of the utmost importance to emphasise 
this point here because religion has often been 
thought to depend for its " proof " upon the 
interruption of the order of nature, upon mira- 
cles. The doctrine of miracles has often, even 
quite recently, been asserted to stand or fall 
with the doctrine of free will. Nature, it is 
asserted, cannot be a closed system of physical 
forces operating according to uniform laws, 
and the will be at the same time free. Either 
nature is not a closed system or free will is a 
miracle. " You cannot consistently hold," one 
writer says, " that psychical miracles are possi- 
ble and hold that physical miracles are impossi- 
ble." Well, one would likely not gain much 
reputation for logic and still less for common 
sense if one were to argue that he could by an 
act of volition raise his arm, and that therefore 



148 Henri Beegson 

he could by an act of volition raise the dead. 
But this is precisely what the argument above 
would come to. Perhaps the best way to deal 
with a logician of this type would be to invite 
him to test the quality of his logic by actually 
trying his power in the two directions. He 
might thus learn once for all the truth of Emer- 
son's great teaching : " There is no chance or 
anarchy in the universe ; all is law and grada- 
tion." 

It is a fact frequently observed that gains 
in this world are seldom made without corre- 
sponding risks and losses, and, particularly, 
that the truth can never be taught without dan- 
ger of misconception and misinterpretation. 
A brilliant instance of the latter fact was the 
late William James who suggested that the sci- 
entific-academic mind shows an extraordinary 
slowness in acknowledging " facts to exist which 
present themselves as wild facts, with no stall 
or pigeon hole," and was forthwith hailed as 
leader by every form of mysticism and occult- 
ism. The magazines of faith (never very in- 
active) were lighted in numberless breasts of men 
and women, and the floodgates were thrown wide 
for " spiritualists," faith healers, telepathists 
and mystery mongers of every class and name. 
Bergson is at the present time in danger of suf- 
fering the same evil fate. Doctrinaires as 
widely apart as syndicalists, socialists and an- 



The Value of Life 149 

archists have claimed him for their leader. The 
forces (always with us in disquieting numbers) 
arrayed against the existing social order seem 
to have derived a peculiar comfort from the 
Bergs onian writings. The whole tendency is 
vividly reminiscent of the Rousseauan " back 
to nature " movement of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Nature is distinctionless, streaming; the 
differentiation and organisation which it shows 
are a mere human artifice, and hence imperfect. 
God made the country and man made the town ; 
whence it follows that existent society is an evil 
which ought to be resisted. Of such and simi- 
lar unprofitable aberrations the newspapers and 
magazines are now full. 

From the other side comes traditional theo- 
logy and finds in Bergson's doctrines the war- 
rant for a whole array of doctrines which, to 
say the least, should not be drawn from the po- 
sition of obscurity to which the progress of 
time has assigned them without being subjected 
to very complete revision, " miracles " (I quote 
from an influential religious newspaper) " the 
fall, sin, revelation, redemption." These an- 
cient doctrines doubtless have profound signifi- 
cance if it can be freed from the accumulation 
of theological verbiage which weights it down 
and hides it from view. If Bergs onism will give 
us a truly modern theology it will confer a great 
intellectual and spiritual benefit ; but a new the- 



150 Henei Bergson 

ology which shall be really abreast with modern 
knowledge and sentiment can be gained only, I 
am persuaded, by going forward, not backward, 
to the old conceptions and distinctions. 

What is one man's meat is another's poison. 
Doubtless, what scientists need is to be reminded 
of the limitation of mere analysis and abstract 
intellection, and to practise intuition and in- 
sight. What occultists and dreamers need is 
" that the northwest wind of science should get 
into them and blow their sickliness and barbar- 
ism away." And what all good men and women 
need is to be freed from misgivings and fear, and 
to be fortified in their better resolutions, so as 
to fit them for the highest task of which a man 
is capable, the task, namely, of sustaining and 
furthering the interests of right and of truth, 
and of making the gift of life one which shall 
be increasingly desirable to those who have been 
destined to share in it. To these ends, we may 
feel sure, no one would be more anxious to con- 
tribute than Bergson himself. 



XVII 

BERGSON AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF 

RELIGION — THE PROBLEM 

OF DEATH 



XVII 

BERGSON AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 

THE PROBLEM OF DEATH 

The central problem of philosophy, and par- 
ticularly of the philosophy of religion, whose 
main interest it is to appraise the meaning of 
reality when regarded in relation to human in- 
terests and aspirations, has often been said to 
be the problem of death. Plato, indeed, de- 
fined philosophy as a meditation on death, and 
the problem of death has remained, along with 
that of God and of freedom, one of the stand- 
ard problems of which philosophy, according 
to a tacit but widespread demand, must give 
some accounting. Nor is formal philosophy 
alone occupied with this problem: for death is 
so sensational and universal a phenomenon, and 
it so often comes as the violent interrupter of 
our work and our hopes, that it forces itself 
upon the attention of even the most heedless 
and stoical, and thus becomes one of the prin- 
cipal topics of popular reflection and surmise, 
as the most signal illustration of that cru- 
elty of impermanence which pervades nature 
153 



154 Henri Bergson 

throughout. " Tempora mutantur, nos et 
mutamur in illis." 

Now it would be natural to suppose that a 
philosophy which raises the principle of life 
into a central principle of all reality and ex- 
istence would have some clear word upon the 
vexed question of death and a future existence. 
Nevertheless, Bergson has singularly little to 
say upon the question, and the few passages 
which bear directly upon it are either so ob- 
viously rhetorical or else so cautious and tenta- 
tive in their tone as to leave the reader entirely 
in doubt as to what Bergson's views of the ex- 
istence and the significance of death really are. 
It is not very difficult, however, although it has, 
I believe, not often been done, to trace out the 
implications of Bergson's expressed metaphys- 
ical doctrines with a view to seeing what this 
" metaphysician of the life force " has to teach 
us concerning the final destiny of life — that 
principle about the nature and activities of 
which he has more to say than about any other 
one thing. 

The question of future life is a very am- 
biguous one, and we cannot hope to deal very 
successfully with the bearing of Bergson's phi- 
losophy on the question until this ambiguity is 
somewhat cleared up by making a few very ele- 
mentary distinctions. It plainly contains a 
number of distinguishable questions which admit 



The Problem of Death 155 

of being treated separately. Only two of these 
need concern us here. 

A distinction must be made, in the first place, 
between the survival of life in some form or 
other, and the survival of the specified or in- 
dividuated forms of life which we call individuals 
or persons, in other words, between the survival 
of life as such, and individual immortality. 
Second, we must distinguish between the tem- 
porary survival of life (either general or in- 
dividual) and the eternity of life, or immortality 
in the strict sense of the word. It is easy to 
see that the two kinds of survival are very dif- 
ferent, and that either one is an antecedent 
possibility. 1 The various possibilities, then, to 
enumerate them in full, are (1) that life in 
some form will temporarily survive the death of 
any living individual; (2) that life in some 
form is eternal; (3) that the individual is de- 
stroyed at death; (4) that the individual sur- 
vives death for a time; (5) that the individual 
is immortal. The divisions are of course not 
mutually exclusive, the latter ones involving 

i It is the failure to seize these simple distinctions 
which renders much of the recent literature on the im- 
plications of Bergson's philosophy for the problems of 
religion and of life so utterly valueless. Cf., for ex- 
ample, the article, Some Implications of Bergson's 
Philosophy, in the North American Review for March, 
1914. There are doubtless other pieces which are still 
more sleazy and uncritical than this one, but I have not 
read them. 



156 Henri Bergson 

the former. The character of Bergson's sys- 
tem makes it especially important to keep these 
distinctions clearly in mind; for while even the 
eternal survival of life in some form may be 
asserted with considerable assurance, the sur- 
vival of the individual would seem to be highly 
problematic, something, in any case, the pos- 
sibility of which would have to be ascertained 
by a number of special considerations which 
have perhaps not been fully worked out even 
by Bergson himself. And the matter is doubt- 
less of first-rate importance for the question 
which according to McTaggart is the funda- 
mental question of any philosophy of religion: 
Is the world good on the whole ? The mortality 
of the individual, for example, might be quite 
consistent with the goodness of the universe on 
the whole, if only other lives survive, and hu- 
man ideals, in James' fine phrase, come else- 
where to fruition. This seems to have been in 
the mind of Marcus Aurelius when he reminds 
us that no matter how long a man might live, 
he could lose no other life than his own. The 
universe, that is, would still contain other lives, 
and that is enough. 

The eternity of life in some form seems to 
follow directly from the somewhat dazzling 
Bergsonian doctrine that the sole reality is 
" immediacy," that reality, that is, is to be 
found in the very texture of immediate experi- 



The Problem of Death 157 

ence itself, considered as independent of a so- 
called world of " objects." If the world is a 
feeling it must be felt to exist. " Esse est 
percipi." So long as anything at all exists, 
so long consciousness, and hence life, must exist 
too. The battle of life would thus seem to be 
won without much resistance, life's enemy hav- 
ing itself no true existence and hence no power 
to harm. 

As a God self-slain on his own strange altar, 
Death lies dead; 

so that the determined charge of life upon its 
ancient enemy matter as pictured in the rather 
grotesque flight of rhetoric at the end of the 
third chapter of Creative Evolution would seem 
to be little more than a gratuitous display of 
military effort, calculated to impress the popu- 
lace. 1 

i " As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our 
entire solar system, drawn along with it in that un- 
divided movement of descent which is materiality itself, 
so all organized beings, from the humblest to the high- 
est, from the first origins of life to the time in which 
we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence 
a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of 
matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold 
together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. 
The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides 
animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in 
time, is one immense army galloping beside and before 
and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able 
to beat down every resistance and clear the most formi- 
dable obstacles, perhaps even death." 



158 Henri Beegson 

Still, the references in this oft-quoted pas- 
sage to the " undivided movement of descent 
which is materiality itself," and to the contrary 
impulsion of life, " the inverse of the movement 
of matter," are full of ominous significance, re- 
minding us, as they do, of another Bergsonian 
doctrine, the doctrine of the equal existence of 
two principles, life and matter, which seems to 
be a complete retraction of the monistic ideal- 
ism which asserted consciousness to be the sole 
reality. This dualistic aspect of Bergson's sys- 
tem is indeed one of its most striking and char- 
acteristic features, and we have had occasion to 
refer to it more than once in our previous dis- 
cussions. A large part of the popularity of 
Bergson's system (the love of conflict is age- 
old and ineradicable in the human breast) is 
doubtless due to this dramatic competition, this 
endless " Wechselspiel von Hemmen und von 
Streben," between the two opposing principles 
of reality, life and its ancient enemy, matter, 
which the Bergsonian philosophy teaches. Life 
appears as the hero, matter as a sort of heavy 
villain in this universal and determined conflict. 
Life is ever becoming entangled, ever extricating 
itself; flanking, penetrating, retreating, again 
moving forward, life ever outwitting, with an 
infinitely wise art, its inert and intractable foe, 
brute necessity, in the shape of matter and 
mechanism. 



The Problem of Death 159 

Nevertheless, this dualism need perhaps not 
trouble us unduly, as it seems after all to be 
merely an aspect of the world's appearance, 
and not to represent it as it really is. The 
reader will remember (a memory, even if it is 
not an infallible Bergsonian memory, is at times 
a highly inconvenient thing) that matter is 
merely a fiction of the scientific intelligence, 
invented to facilitate action, and has, therefore, 
after all, no genuine existence. Besides, if 
matter (or the fiction of matter) is really in- 
strumental to action it is difficult to see how it 
could be obstructive of action, an " inverse 
movement " which tends to render nugatory 
the efforts which life puts forth. As Mr. 
Santayana aptly remarks : " If matter were 
merely the periphery which life draws around 
itself, in order to be a definite life, matter could 
never abolish any life ; as the ring of a circus 
or the sand of the arena can never abolish the 
show for which they have been prepared. Life 
would then be fed and defined by matter, as an 
artist is served by the matter he needs to carry 
on his art." In any case, if the fiction of 
matter were created by life merely to facilitate 
action, it could, one would suppose, be again 
withdrawn by life as soon as it proved to be 
really obstructive of the movement of life, in- 
stead of serving and furthering it. 

The whole contrast between the two forces, 



160 Henri Beegsok 

life and matter, is indeed only an illustration of 
Bergson's incurable addiction to dichotomy, and 
to the reification of concepts, the erection of 
them into entities or even powers which is, ac- 
cording to Bergson's standing criticism, one of 
the bosom vices of " intellectualism." Berg- 
son's strong pictorial imagination, indeed, con- 
stantly leads him to the use of language which 
is often doubtless too crassly spatial for even 
the most confirmed of intellectualists. So life 
moves up and matter down, and the two en- 
deavour to overcome and destroy each other. 
But, strictly speaking, there is no matter and 
no movement and no up nor down. Besides, in 
a reality with a universal memory the part 
" destroyed " would still persist to haunt its 
destroyer; nay, its inherent life and energy 
would become the very condition of that crea- 
tivity which is of all nature's traits the most 
interesting and significant. Universal animism 
and the ceaseless antagonism of life and matter ; 
radical becoming and eternal conservation; 
matter a fiction and matter a force ; an uncom- 
promising nominalism and an idealism as real 
and as influential as that of Plato or Aristotle ; 
the employment of sharp analysis and an in- 
comparable finesse of dialectic to prove the fu- 
tility of all analysis and the uselessness of all 
dialectic: these are only some of the internal 



The Problem of Death 161 

contradictions and paradoxes which (if intel- 
lectual consistency has not entirely ceased to 
be a virtue) would seem to require a somewhat 
more sustained effort of intuition, or else of 
some other form of mental operation, than they 
have so far received at the hands of their au- 
thor. 

The answer, then, to the question as to the 
ultimate survival of life would seem to depend 
largely upon the question as to what part of 
Bergson's system is taken as the more funda- 
mental and characteristic, the spiritual monism 
implied in the identification of reality with ex- 
perience, immediate or other, or the dualism 
of life and matter, with their unceasing conflict. 
If we decide, as I think we are bound to do, in 
favour of the former alternative, it is possible 
to view the dualism in Bergson's system as 
merely an accommodation to popular thought 
and to science, as a failure on the part of Berg- 
son (always a somewhat pardonable one in a 
" new " philosopher) to abandon wholly the ter- 
minology of the modes of thought which he is 
criticising. It is well to remind ourselves, 
meanwhile, that, even if we adopt the less favour- 
able dualistic interpretation, the chances of life's 
survival are only lessened, not forfeited. Al- 
though the issue of the conflict between life and 
mechanism may be doubtful and long delayed, 



162 Henri Bergsoic 

life may still throw the last stone, and even- 
tually win its freedom from the tyranny of 
death and of fate. 

When we pass to the question of the survival 
of individual forms of life, to the question of 
" individual immortality," our problem seems to 
become somewhat less difficult. There are two 
lines of argument which favour immortality, 
one positive, one negative. The first is in a 
sense a reiteration of the idealistic argument 
for the eternity of consciousness, namely, that 
only the immediate, that is, consciousness, is 
real. The second consists in a denial of the 
orthodox scientific doctrine of the dependence 
of consciousness upon some form of nervous or- 
ganisation. Let us take them in their order. 

(1) If we say that consciousness is the only 
reality, death, which is the absence of conscious- 
ness, cannot be real; its reality, at any rate, 
could never be verified. No one can witness his 
own death. And even if one could, one could 
surely never testify to his own death. Disem- 
bodied spirits (provided they existed and had 
the power of communication) could indeed bear 
testimony to the possibility of a future exist- 
ence, but the contrary testimony would obvi- 
ously be worthless. As Mr. Schiller remarks, 
while the ghost of Lord Lyttelton might ad- 
monish his friend that the latter's doubts in 
the future were unfounded, no ghost could re- 



The Problem of Death 163 

turn and possibly convince any one that future 
life was an illusion. 

(2) The most serious scientific argument 
against immortality, the argument from the 
alleged dependence of consciousness upon the 
body, particularly the brain, is invalidated in 
advance by Bergs on's views of the relation of 
consciousness to the brain, which have already 
been briefly indicated in a previous connection 
(Section XII). Consciousness or pure mem- 
ory (as distinguished from habit) is a purely 
psychical mode of existence, and does not de- 
pend for its functioning upon the material dis- 
positions of the brain. The brain does not 
secrete thought, as the liver secretes bile, to use 
an old illustration, or as heated water produces 
steam, it merely transmits it, as a glass window 
pane transmits light, or a metal rod transmits 
heat. 

The transmission hypothesis is not contra- 
dicted, it may be worth while to remark in pass- 
ing, by the argument from nervous pathology 
to the eifect that brain disturbances produce 
disturbances in the course of consciousness. 
This is to be expected on the transmission 
theory as well as on the older materialistic 
hypothesis according to which the brain pro- 
duces or creates consciousness. A window pane 
which is wrinkled or covered with dust cannot 
transmit light so well as one which is perfect 



164 Henri Bergson 

and free from dust. The pathological facts, 
then, prove nothing whatever against the in- 
dependent existence of consciousness. To 
adapt somewhat an illustration of Mr. McTag- 
gart's, it would be as hazardous to maintain 
that there would be no consciousness if there 
were no brain as it would be to insist that if a 
man walked out of his house he could not see 
daylight because there would no longer be any 
windows through which he could see it. 

Still, let us suppose that consciousness, which 
exists otherwise in a vast ocean of conscious- 
ness, can come to the surface, as it were, only 
through media, like nervous substance, which 
it finds pervious to the particular kind of 
energy which it represents, just as heat or 
light cannot pass through matter by any path, 
but must take the path of readiest conductivity, 
whatever path it finds most pervious to it. Or 
let us adopt the analogous hypothesis, one al- 
ready familiar to antiquity, but held to-day by 
William James and Bergson, that it is the 
bodily organisation which determines the indi- 
viduality of each self. Evidently, on either 
one of these hypotheses the individualised form 
of consciousness which we mean by personality, 
and whose perpetuity we mean to assert in the 
doctrine of individual immortality, must disap- 
pear with the destruction of the body to which 
it owes its individual existence. The only pos- 



The Problem of Death 165 

sibility of securing individual immortality, in 
this case, would evidently be to secure the per- 
petuation of the organism to which the indi- 
vidualised form of consciousness is attached. 
But of the success of this aspiration men are 
only too well apprised. If by death we mean 
the destruction of the body, death's reality is 
probably for most men beyond the reach of 
metaphysical argument. To doubt death, in 
this sense, would be at least as difficult as it is 
for an ardent realist to doubt the existence of 
the chair in which he is sitting, a feat which, 
according to Mr. Russell, is possible only for 
those who have had a long training in phi- 
losophy! Not only is the organism destroyed 
by matter and mechanism, by those fatal forces 
which everywhere environ it, but life itself de- 
stroys other life, as the most casual observation 
of nature will show. " Nothing arises in na- 
ture," says Lucretius, " save helped by the death 
of some other thing." Each animal life lives 
at the sacrifice of other lives, until it shall itself 
fall victim to some stronger, hungrier or more 
malicious foe. And even if there were no 
" matter and mechanism " or other living beings 
to destroy the individual, life, as modern science 
tells us, at least in its more highly organised 
forms, represents such an unstable equilibrium 
that it tends to break down of itself as a sheer 
result of its imperfect organisation. Weis- 



166 Henri Bergson 

mann's claim that natural death is not a neces- 
sity for the lowest forms of life, namely pro- 
tozoa, has been apparently corroborated by 
recent experiments upon paramoecium, which 
have shown that a single individual can per- 
petuate itself indefinitely by mere division, with- 
out conjugation, if environmental conditions 
are sufficiently favourable, if the culture me- 
dium, for example, is changed frequently and 
is kept free from bacteria. But organisms 
which have passed this low stage of evolution 
cannot hope for so much. " Groups of cells in 
our bodies," a recent scientist writes, " are 
highly specialised into certain organs, each de- 
pendent upon other organs for its existence. 
When one part gives out, other parts must 
suffer, until finally the entire system succumbs. 
The penalty of our highly developed organisa- 
tion is death." 

It appears, then, that so far from increasing 
our chances of life by attaining a higher and 
more complex organisation, our only chance of 
an indefinite individual survival is by paying 
the penalty (if this were possible) of degrada- 
tion to the rank of unicellular creatures. But 
an immortality such as amoeba are capable of 
would, I suppose, be hardly regarded as worth 
the having. The point is an interesting one, 
as it brings out very clearly something which 
is often overlooked, namely that men's desire 



The Problem of Death 167 

for immortality is based upon the tacit as- 
sumption that future life will be very happy, 
that it will be an improvement over the present 
life, or at least fully as desirable. But that it 
will be is something which can be rendered 
plausible only by a number of special considera- 
tions which are usually, I believe, not inde- 
pendently examined. 

The regular way for life to perpetuate itself, 
even in paramoecium, is by conjugation and re- 
production. Bergson's general theory of the 
sheaflike character of biological evolution seems 
to favour the view, too, that life perpetuates it- 
self through a succession of individuals, and that 
the consciousness of the individual is only a ray, 
as it were, from an original unitary stream of 
consciousness which has split up in the forward 
movement of evolution. The original life im- 
pulse was a unitary affair which is shattered 
in its progress. The stream of life breaks, is 
sometimes turned aside, takes on fresh mo- 
mentum, is arrested, wastes itself, is ever push- 
ing forward and ever checked by the strange 
obduracy and stubbornness of its material ob- 
stacle. The " one far-off divine event to which 
the whole creation moves " is in any case not 
the increasing harmony and unity of life and 
living beings, as if, after all, " all the living " 
did not " hold together " in order to over- 
come every resistance, " perhaps even death." 



168 Henri Bergson 

" Life, in proportion to its progress, is scat- 
tered in manifestations which undoubtedly owe 
to their common origin the fact that they are 
complementary to each other in certain re- 
spects, but which are none the less mutually in- 
compatible and antagonistic. So the discord 
among species will go on increasing. . . . The 
philosopher who begins by laying down as a 
principle that each detail is connected with some 
general plan of the whole, goes from one dis- 
appointment to another as soon as he begins 
to examine the facts." The unity which the 
diverging directions of life manifest is due to 
the faint traces which they still show of their 
common source. " The harmony," to cite an 
oft-quoted passage, " lies behind, not before." 

Thus every day is a day of creation and a 
day of death. " The forms of life," according 
to the poetic interpretation of Bergson by Mr. 
Burroughs, " are like the clouds in the summer 
sky, ever and never the same ; the vital currents 
flow forever, and we rise to the surface like 
changing, iridescent bubbles that dance and play 
for a moment, and are succeeded by others, and 
ever others," new souls ever arising and ceasing 
to be, or else passing from body to body, in an 
indefinite or possibly endless series of transmi- 
grations. 

The belief in the prolongation of the indi- 
vidual's identity beyond the event of death 



The Problem of Death 169 

tends to be further weakened when we consider 
the alterations, and the consequent loss of iden- 
tity, which a self suffers even during its present 
history. In order to deal with the question as 
intelligibly as possible, let us first ask our- 
selves what is meant by the term individual or 
personal identity. We have already dealt with 
this question to some extent in connection with 
the problem of change (Section XIV). We 
there suggested that the unity or the identity 
of the self depends upon an interest or purpose 
which remains identical throughout the various 
mutations which the self suffers. The unity, 
we said, was a teleological unity like that of a 
drama or a game of skill, a unity imparted to 
the inner life by an underlying plan, aim or in- 
terest which this life is striving to realise or 
fulfil. Nothing is more evident, however, than 
that the organisation or integration of the 
inner life is always, at any given time, imper- 
fect, to say nothing of the fluctuations in these 
interests and ideals incident to growth and 
maturation, and to the crises to which our inner 
life is always liable. Not only is there at any 
given time a more or less permanent strati- 
fication of the self into systems of differ- 
ent and more or less incompatible interests 
and aims, but the history of any life is little 
more than a succession of characteristic groups 
of aims and interests, each of which arises only 



170 Henri Bergson 

in order to dissolve and give way to its successor. 
It is no doubt true that the unity and con- 
tinuity of the individual's inner life nave fre- 
quently been overemphasised. Aside from the 
abnormal cases of more or less complete dis- 
turbance of memory functions, or the graver 
disturbances of alteration, duplication and mul- 
tiplication of the self, we have the common ex- 
periences of defective memory, false memory, 
and the numerous changes in one's tastes, judg- 
ments, emotional attitudes, ambitions, ideals 
and the like, incident to personal development 
and decline. If our bodies undergo a complete 
change every seven } r ears, as a popular my- 
thology has it, our minds and characters some- 
times, as in the phenomena of " conversion," 
and at times of great mental and emotional 
stress due to unexpected fortune or calamity, 
undergo a far more radical and complete 
change, and are always, as every theory of 
education must assume, capable of changes for 
the better. It may thus easily happen that 
two stages of a man's life resemble each other 
less than two parallel stages of different men's 
lives, so that " individual identity " would here 
be evidently little more than a name. " Turn 
thy thoughts," says the Roman Stoic, " to the 
consideration of thy life, thy life as a child, as 
a youth, thy manhood, thy old age, for in these 
also every change was a death. Is this any- 



The Problem of Death 171 

thing to fear? In like manner, then, neither 
are the termination and cessation and change 
of thy whole life a thing to be afraid of." 

It is of course true that the different stages 
of the self's development are not cut off from 
each other by any clear lines of demarcation, 
something being always carried over from one 
stage of development to another. Even if the 
stream of consciousness proper continually re- 
news itself, the results of past experience reg- 
ister themselves in the nervous system, past 
actions solidify into habits, habits form char- 
acter. A man's past being known, we can 
diagnose his present and largely anticipate his 
future, as if his past after all projects itself 
into the present. Nero is a criminal even be- 
tween his crimes, as his next act would prove. 
Memory, furthermore, does not entirely fail. 
The various changes which the self undergoes 
are never, except in the abnormal cases re- 
corded by the psychical researchers, so radical 
and profound that the sense of personal iden- 
tity is entirely lost. The tastes, judgments, 
emotional attitudes, ideals, for example, of our 
past histor} 7 are still recognised as ours. We 
cannot exchange them with some one else's 
similar past experiences, no matter how much 
we may profit from such exchange, and might, 
accordingly, wish to make it. 

It is therefore a possibility, provided we can 



172 Henri Bergson 

believe in the persistence of memory independ- 
ently of a nervous organisation (without mem- 
ory " future " life would not be a continuation 
of the present life, but a different life), that the 
self may survive the crisis of death, as it has 
survived many lesser ones. And I do not see 
how any one can disprove that it will. 1 

Whatever our conclusions on that may be, a 
man can, in any event, be certain of such im- 
mortality as is implied in the partial transmis- 
sion of his traits to posterity, and in the pres- 
ervation of his works and his influence. So 
long as the human race continues to exist, the 
effects of an individual life may continue to exist 
too, provided these effects are regarded as 
worthy of preservation. Science, inventions, 
art, letters, institutions, in short, civilisation — 
these are but the products and work of past 
lives which have been hoarded up and guarded 

i There is one argument which it might be worth 
while to mention. It has often been urged (as, for 
example, by Mr. McTaggart) that the same consider- 
ations which go to prove the immortality of the soul also 
prove its pre-existence. But if a genuine continuance 
of life depends upon memory, then the soul has no pre- 
existence. For we do not remember any pre-existence. 
And if we have lived previous lives and have forgotten 
them, there is no reason to believe that we shall remember 
anything of the present life during a subsequent life. 
But this would not be immortality. Cf., for the whole 
subject, Chapters III and IV in Mr. McTaggart's Some 
Dogmas of Religion, a remarkably interesting and acute 
work which is entirely too little known. 



The Problem of Death 173 

against destruction, because they have proved 
their fitness to survive. And a comparatively 
small number of men may hope for a transitory 
existence beyond their death in the memories of 
other men, in the shape of posthumous fame. 
But this too will cease in a short time. Noth- 
ing indeed is so calculated to impress upon us 
the transitoriness of a life, even in the form of 
its impersonal products and effects, as the fre- 
quency with which men fail of being credited 
with their achievements, and the failure of those 
fragile hopes, gratitude and posthumous fame. 
When one sees even these perish before one's 
eyes, or become merged in the general mass, it 
becomes more difficult than ever to believe that 
a man's life can be a permanent element in a 
universe " in which nations and planets are but 
momentary shapes." " Of human life the time 
is a point, and the substance is in a flux, . . . 
and the soul is a whirl, and fortune hard to di- 
vine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment. 
And to say all in a word, everything which be- 
longs to the body is a stream, and what belongs 
to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a 
warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after- 
fame is oblivion." 

If we ask the question, finally, on what con- 
ditions the survival of the self, in so far as it 
does survive, will depend, the answer can be 
given only in general terms. The conditions 



174 Henri Bergson 

under which a living organism as we know it on 
earth survives is, as evolutionary science tells 
us, that its parts are so adjusted to each other 
as to function harmoniously in the service of the 
organism as a whole, and that the organism as 
a whole is adjusted to the conditions outside it 
upon which it depends. The self's survival, too, 
one may say in general, will likely depend upon 
the extent to which it has achieved unity of life 
through the consistent and orderly pursuit of 
some aim, interest or plan, and upon the de- 
gree to which this aim, interest or plan coin- 
cides with the fundamental purpose of the uni- 
verse in which the self is to exist. In other 
words, its survival will depend upon the con- 
sistent and orderly pursuit of those objects and 
interests which are themselves most central and 
normative in the universe. The two conditions 
which seem requisite for immortality in any form, 
therefore, are a knowledge of the true struc- 
ture and purpose of the universe in which our 
lot is cast, and an identification of our interests 
and aims with those elements in it which are 
most lasting and significant. In the noble sym- 
bolism of Scripture, we must lay up treasures 
in heaven where neither moth nor rust doth cor- 
rupt, and where thieves do not break through 
nor steal. Immortality, it follows from this, 
may then be conditional and a matter of degree. 
Moreover, it is not something which is thrust 



The Problem of Death 175 

upon us whether we will or no. It is not, as 
the Germans say, a Gabe but an Aufgabe, not 
a gift but an achievement. As Professor 
Taylor finely says : " A future existence is not 
a heritage into which we are safe to step when 
the time comes, but a conquest to be won by the 
strenuous devotion of life to the acquisition of 
a rich, and at the same time orderly and har- 
monious, moral selfhood. And thus the belief 
in a future life, in so far as it acts in any given 
case as a spur to such strenuous living, might 
be itself a factor in bringing about its own ful- 
filment." 

It is often asserted that unless immortality 
were true, life would lose its value. I cannot 
think this judgment just. If life has been 
valuable, its value is not diminished or de- 
stroyed by life's termination. Do we regard 
rare cloud effects as valueless because we know 
them to be evanescent? Or is it a loss that a 
flower should have blossomed even if its beauty 
does not survive the passing of spring? 

Is it so small a thing 
To have enjoyed the sun, 
To have lived light in the spring, 
To have loved, to have thought, to have done, 
To have advanced true friends, and beat down 
baffling foes? 

Life is what it is, and the cessation of my life 



176 Henri Bergson 

does not render other lives valueless. Neither 
does it render the universe uninteresting or bad. 
And since life is not an unmixed good, death 
cannot be wholly evil. " For with death," as 
Mr. McTaggart says, " we leave behind us 
memory, and old age, and fatigue. And surely 
death acquires a new and deeper significance 
when we regard it no longer as a single and 
unexplained break in an unending life, but as 
part of the continually recurring rhythm of 
progress — as inevitable, as natural, and as 
benevolent as sleep. We have only left youth 
behind us, as at noon we have left the sunrise. 
They will both come back, and they do not 
grow old." 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

(Only the more important English titles are 
included.) 

Bergson, H., Time and Free Will, London, 1910. 

Bergson, H., Matter and Memory, London, 1911. 

Bergson, H., Laughter; An Essay on the Mean- 
ing of the Comic, London, 1911. 

Bergson, H., Introduction to Metaphysics, New 
York, 1912. 

Bergson, H., Creative Evolution, New York, 
1911. 

Bergson, H., Life and Consciousness, Hibbert 
Journal, Oct., 1911. 

Bergson, H., Professor Bergson on the Soul, 
Educational Review, Jan., 1912. 

Babbit, I., Bergson and Rousseau, Nation, Nov. 
14, 1912. 

Balfour, A. J., Creative Evolution and Philo- 
sophic Doubt, Hibbert Journal, Oct., 1911. 
Same, Living Age, Dec. 2, 1911. 

Balsillie, David, Professor Bergson on Time 
and Free Will, Mind, July, 1911. 

Balsillie, David, An Examination of Profes- 
sor Bergson's Philosophy, London, 1912. 

Barr, Nann Clark, The Dualism of Bergson, 
Philosophical Review, Nov., 1913. 
179 



180 Henri Bergson 

Bode, B. H., L'evolution creatrice, Phil. Rev., 
Jan., 1908. 

Bosanquet, B., The Prediction of Human Con- 
duct; A Study in Bergson, Int. Jo. Ethics, 
Oct., 1910. 

Burns, C. D., Bergson: A Criticism of His Phi- 
losophy, No. Am. Rev., March, 1912. 

Burroughs, John, A Prophet of the Soul, Atl. 
Monthly, Jan., 1914. 

Calkins, M. W., Henri Bergson, Personalist, 
Phil. Rev., Nov., 1912. 

Carr, H. W., Bergson's Theory of Knowledge, 
Proc. Aristotelian Soc, 1909. 

Carr, H. W., Bergson's Theory of Instinct, 
Proc. Aristotelian Soc, 1910. 

Carr, H. W., The Philosophy of Bergson, Hibbert 
Journal, July, 1910. 

Carr, H. W., Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of 
Change, London, 1912. 

Cory, C. E., Bergson's Intellect and Matter, Phil. 
Rev., Sept., 1913. 

Dodson, G. R., Bergson and the Modern Spirit, 
1913. 

Dolson, G. N., The Philosophy of Henri Berg- 
son, Phil. Rev., Nov., 1910, Jan., 1911. 

Elliot, H. S. R., Modern Science and the Illu- 
sions of Professor Bergson, London, 1912. 

Fawcett, E. D., Matter and Memory, Mind, 
April, 1912. 

Gerrard, I. J., Bergson: An Exposition and Crit- 
icism, 1912. 

Hermann, E., Eucken and Bergson: Their Sig- 



Bibliography 181 

nificance for Christian Thought, London, 
1912. 

Hulme, T. E., The New Philosophy, New Age, 
July, 1909. 

Jacoby, G., Henri Bergson, Pragmatism and 
Schopenhauer, Monist, Oct., 1912. 

James, William, A Great French Philosopher at 
Harvard, Nation, March 31, 1910. 

James, William, The Philosophy of Bergson, Hib- 
bert Journal, April, 1909. Also in A Plu- 
ralistic Universe, New York, 1909. 

James, William, Bradley or Bergson? Journal 
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Meth- 
ods, Jan. 20, 1910. 

Jordan, Bruno, Kant and Bergson, Monist, July, 
1912. 

Jourdain, P. E. B., Logic, M. Bergson and Mr. 
H. G. Wells, Hibbert Journal, July, 1912. 

Kallen, H. M., James, Bergson and Mr. Pitkin, 
Journal Phil., Psych., and Sci. Methods, June 
23, 1910. 

Kitchin, D. B., Bergson for Beginners, New 
York, 1913. 

Lalande, Andre, Philosophy in France (1905), 
Phil. Rev., May, 1906. 

Lalande, Andre, Philosophy in France (1907), 
Phil. Rev., May, 1908. 

Leighton, J. A., On Continuity and Discreteness, 
Journal Phil., Psych., and Scientific Meth- 
ods, April 28, 1910. 

Le Roy, E., The New Philosophy of Henri Berg- 
son, New York, 1913. 

Libby, M. F., The Continuity of Bergson's 



182 Henri Bergson 

Thought, Univ. of Colorado Studies, Sept., 
1912. 

Lindsay, A. D., The Philosophy of Bergson, Lon- 
don, 1911. 

Lodge, O., Balfour and Bergson, Hibbert Jour- 
nal, Jan., 1912. 

Loveday, T., L'evolution creatrice, Mind, July, 
1908. 

Lovejoy, A. O., The Metaphysician of the Life 
Force, Nation, Sept. 30, 1909. 

Lovejoy, A. O., Temporalism and Anti-Intellectu- 
alism: Bergson, Phil. Rev., May, 1912. 

Lovejoy, A. O., The Practical Tendencies of 
Bergsonism, Inter. Jo. Ethics, XXIII, 3 and 
4. 

Lovejoy, A. O., Some Antecedents of the Philo- 
sophy of Bergson, Mind, 1913. 

Lovejoy, A. O., Bergson and Romantic Evolution- 
ism, University of California Press, 1914. 

Macintosh, D. C, Bergson and Religion, Bibl. 
World, Jan., 1913. 

Mason, J. W. T., The Bergson Method Confirmed, 
No. Am. Rev., Jan., 1913. 

Mitchell, A., L'evolution creatrice, Journal of 
Phil., Psych., and Sci. Methods, Oct. 22, 
1908. 

Moore, A. W., Bergson and Pragmatism, Phil. 
Rev., July, 1912. 

Mories, A. S., Bergson and Mysticism, Westm. 
Rev., June, 1912. 

Muirhead, J. H., The Philosophy of Bergson, 
Hibbert Journal, July, 1911. 



Bibliography 183 

Palmer, W. S., Presence and Omnipresence, 

Cont. Rev., June, 1908. 
Palmer, W. S., Life and the Brain, Cont. Rev., 

Oct., 1909. 
Palmer, W. S., Thought and Instinct, Nation 

(London), June 5, 1909. 
Paulhan, F., Contemporary Philosophy in France, 

Phil. Rev., Jan., 1900. 
Perry, R. B., Notes on the Philosophy of Henri 

Bergson, Journal Phil., Psych., and Sci. 

Methods, Dec. 7, 1911. 
Perry, R. B., Present Philosophical Tendencies, 

New York, 1912. 
Pitkin, W. B., James and Bergson; or, Who Is 

Against Intellect? Journal Phil., Psych., 

and Sci. Methods, April 28, 1910. 
Quick, O., Bergson's Creative Evolution and the 

Individual, Mind, April, 1913. 
Ross, G. T., The Philosophy of Vitalism, Nation 

(London), March 13, 1909. 
Royce, J., The Reality of the Temporal, Int. Jo. 

Ethics, April, 1910. 
Russell, B., The Philosophy of Bergson, Monist, 

July, 1912. 
Russell, J. E., Bergson's Anti-Intellectualism, 

Journal Phil., Psych., and Sci. Methods, 

Febr. 29, 1912. 
Santayana, G., The Philosophy of M. Henri 

Bergson, in Winds of Doctrine, New York, 

191S. 
Sauvage, G. M., The New Philosophy in France, 

Cath. Univ. Bull., April, 1906, March, 1908. 



184 Henri Bergson 

Scott, J. W., The Pessimism of Bergson, Hib- 
bert Journal, Oct., 1912. 

Scott, J. W., The Pessimism of Creative Evolu- 
tion, Mind, July, 1913. 

Shimer, H. W., Bergson's View of Organic Evo- 
lution, Pop. Science Monthly, Feb., 1913. 

Slosson, E. E., Twelve Major Prophets of To- 
day — Henri Bergson, Independent, June 8, 
1911. 

Slosson, E. E., Recent Developments of Berg- 
son's Philosophy, Independent, June 19, 1913. 

Smith, Norman, Subjectivism and Realism in 
Modern Philosophy, Phil. Rev., March, 1908. 

Solomon, J., The Philosophy of Bergson, Mind, 
Jan., 1911. 

Solomon, J., The Philosophy of Bergson, Fortn. 
Rev., Nov., 1911. 

Solomon, J., Bergson, London, 1911. 

Stewart, J. McK., A Critical Exposition of 
Bergson's Philosophy, London, 1911. 

Taylor, A. E., Review of Matter and Memory, 
Int. Jo. Ethics, Oct., 1911. 

Taylor, A. E., Review of Creative Evolution, Int. 
Jo. Ethics, July, 1912. 

Townsend, J. G., Bergson and Religion, Monist, 
July, 1912. 

Tyrrell, G., Creative Evolution, Hibbert Jour- 
nal, Jan., 1908. 

Underhill, E., Bergson and the Mystics, English 
Rev., Feb., 1912. Same in Living Age, 
March 16, 1912. 

Underhill, E., Mysticism^ New York, 1912. 



Bibliography 185 

Waterlow, S., The Philosophy of Bergson, 
Quart. Rev., Jan., 1912. 

Wolf, A., Natural Realism and Present Tenden- 
cies in Philosophy, Proc. Aristotelian Soc, 
1908-9. 

Wolf, A., The Philosophy of Bergson, Jewish 
Rev., Sept., 1911. 

Wolf, A., Bergson on Teleology and Creative 
Evolution, Hibbert Journal, Jan., 1912. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Absolutism, 142. 
Acquaintance with, 35, 134. 
Activism, 7. 
Analysis, 35, 52, 70, 113, 

114, 115, 135, 136, n. 1. 

See also intellect. 
Anaximander, 18. 
Animism, 71-72, 77-82, 85, 

114. 
Aristotle, 18, 120, 160. 
Arnold, M., quoted, 175. 
Atoms, 61. 
Attention, selective activity 

of, 26, 123-124. 



id," 135; reification of, 

by Bergson, 160. 
Condillac, 9. 
Consciousness. See mind 

and experience. 
Conservation, doctrine of 

eternal, 19, n. 1, 34, 109, 

n. 1, 125-26. 
Continuity. See perma- 
nence. 
Convergence, phenomenon 

of, in evolution, 96-97. 
Creation, 13, 18-20, 85-92, 

143-145. 



Becoming. See change. 

Berkeley, 9. 

Brain, relation of mind to, 

106-107, 163-4. 
Browning, 3, 80-81, 98. 
Burroughs, J., 168. 

Chambers, 90. 

Change, permanence and, 
17-21, 27, 34, 47-51, 109, 
n. 1, 113-114, 119-126, 
134-135, 169-172. 

Conception, relation to per- 
ception, 25-28, 134. 

Concepts, .26, 34, 51, 53; 
doctrine of stationary, 
criticised, 129-136; "flu- 



Darwin, 18. 

Death, problem of, 153-176. 
Democritus, 120. 
Design. See teleology. 
Determinism, freedom and, 

103-110, 116, 146-148. 
Dilthey, 60. 
Disillusionment, as trait of 

modern mind, 3. 
Dualism, in Bergson, 158- 

162. 
Durability, eternal. See 

conservation. 
Duration, 32, 32, n. 1, 41, 

49, 70, 113-15. 

Einfuhlung, 78-82. 



189 



190 



Index 



Elan vital, 87. 

Element, 36, 40, 52, 61. 

Emanationism, 18. 

Emerson, 3, 4, 148. 

Empedocles, 120. 

Empiricism, 40-43. 

End. See teleology. 

Eucken, 6, 7, 12. 

Evolution, as creative, 13, 
85-92, 115, 143-145; 
sheaf-like character of, 
97, 167; as indeterminate, 
97-99, 116, 145. 

Evolutionism, radical, 17- 
20. 

Experience, reconstruction 
of primordial, 25-28 ; 
continuity of inner, 31- 
36,70,114,122-124; qual- 
itative diversity of, 32, 
70; immediacy of, 35, 
134, 136, n. 1. 

Fame, 3-4 ; posthumous, 

173. 
Freedom, determinism and, 

103-110, 116, 146-48. 

Finalism. See teleology. 
Fittest, survival of, 87-88. 

God, 18-20, 145. 
Goethe, 3, 90. 

Hegel, 18, 43, 60. 
Henderson, 89. 
Heraclitus, 17. 
Heredity, 87-88, 172; so- 
cial, 172-73. 
Herz, 60. 



Hibben, 132-133. 
Hume, 9. 

Idealism, the new, 10-13. 

Identity, 123-124, 168-172. 
See also permanence. 

Immediacy, higher and 
lower, 136, n. 1; reality 
as, 156-157. See also du- 
ration and intuition. 

Immortality, 13, 106, 153- 
176; individual, 162-175; 
"spiritualistic" evidence 
for, 162-163; social, 172- 
73; conditions of, 173- 
175; conditional, 174; de- 
grees of, 174; an achieve- 
ment, 174-175. See also 
life. 

Individuality, as depend- 
ing on bodily organisa- 
tion, 164. 

Instinct, genetic relation 
of, to intelligence, 98. 

Intellect, 20-21, 25-62, 68- 
69. See also concepts, 
science and intuition. 

Intelligence and instinct, 
genetic relation of, 98. 

Intuition, 32, 65-82, 113, 
114; results of, incom- 
municable, 67, 68, n. 1, 
133-134 ; identical with 
reason, 135-36. 

Jakobi, 58. 

James, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 26, 35, 
53, 67, 106, 129-30, 140- 
41, 142, 148, 156, 164. 



Index 



191 



Kant, 105, 132. 
Klein, F., 60. 

Knowledge, two uses of, 5. 
Krueger, F., XIII. 

Laas, 60. 

Lamarck, 90. 

Law, hypothetical charac- 
ter of natural, 58-60. 

Leibniz, 72-3, 114. 

Life^ contrasted with mat- 
ter, 85-6, 158-160; value 
of, 139-150, 175-76; uni- 
ty of, 167; survival of, 
distinguished from indi- 
vidual immortality, 155- 
56. See also immortality. 

Lipps, 60. 

Literature, dearth of im- 
aginative, 3-5. 

Locke, 9. 

Lodge, Sir Oliver, 58, 59, 
146. 

Lovejoy, XII, 17, 18, 109- 
10. 

Lucretius, 165. 

Mach, 60. 

Malebranche, 9. 

Marchesini, 60. 

Marcus Aurelius, 156, 170, 
173. 

Matter, contrasted with 
life, 85-6, 158-160. 

McTaggart, 156, 164, 172, 
n. 1, 176. 

Mechanism and teleology, 
95-9, 116. 

Memory, relation to con- 
ception, 26 ; dependence 



of future life upon, 172. 

Mill, J. S., 9. 

Mind, place of, in uni- 
verse, 11; relation to 
brain, 106-7, 163-64; mo- 
saic representation of, 
31-43, 104, 110, 116; uni- 
ty of, 122-24, 168-72. See 
also experience. 

Miracle, 147-48. See also 
nature, uniformity of. 

Monad, representative char- 
acter of, 72-3, 114-15. 

Monism, spiritual, 156-57, 
161, 162. See also life 
and matter. 

Motion, and rest, 48-51, 
114, 121. 

Movement, pure, 32. See 
also motion. 

Mutation. See change and 
permanence. 

Miinsterberg, 61-2. 

Naturalism, 10-13, 143-44. 

Nature, uniformity of, 
146-47. See also mira- 
cle. 

Neo-criticists, French, 
XIII. 

Nietzsche, 10. 

Nominalism, of Bergson, 
160. 

Novelty, 92. See also cre- 
ation and science. 

Occultism, 148. 
Optimism, 13, 141-43. 
Ostwald, 60. 



192 



Index 



Parallelism, psychophysi- 
cal, 105. 

Partition, contrasted with 
analysis, 35. 

Paulsen, 5, 90-91. 

Perception and conception, 
25-28, 134. 

Permanence and change, 
17-21, 34, 109, n. 1, 119- 
126, 134-35, 169-72. 

Pessimism, optimism and, 
141-13. 

Philosophy, indifference to- 
ward, 5; characteristics 
of the new, 7-13. 

Plato, 120, 130-31, 153, 160. 

Poincare, 60. 

Pragmatism, 7, 133. 

Pre-existence, 172, n. 1. 

Prophesy, 92, 145. 

Psychology, 31-43, 103-04, 
114. 

Purpose. See teleology. 

Rationalism, 40-43. 

Reason, 135. See also in- 
tellect and analysis. 

Religion, philosophy of, 
139-76; definition of, 
140. 

Rest and motion, 48-51, 
114. 

Romanticism, XII, 10-13. 

Rousseau, 149. 

Royce, 96, 135-36. 

Russell, B., 11, 27, 60, 165. 

Santayana, 8, n. 1, 80, 99, 
159. 



Schelling, XII, 58. 

Schiller, 3, 78. 

Schiller, F. C. S., 162. 

Science, attitude of new 
philosophy towards, 7-8; 
and the inner life, 31- 
43; and the external 
world, 47-62; and spon- 
taneity, 144-45. 

Secretan, 140. 

Selection, natural, 87-8. 

Self, 41-3, 104; stratifica- 
tion of, 168-71; unity of, 
171, 174. See also ex- 
perience. 

Soul. See mind, self and 
experience. 

Spencer, 18. 

Spinoza, 99. 

States, 20, 51; mental, 41, 
104, 114. 

Style, philosophic, 9. 

Suggestion, hypnotic, 108. 

Swinburne, quoted, 157. 

Sympathy, intellectual, 69, 
71-2, 77-82, 113; aesthet- 
ic, 78. 

Synthese, schopferische, 
110. 

Taylor, A. E., 121, 122, 
136, n. 1, 175. 

Teleology, 13 ; mechanism 
and, 95-99, 116; indeter- 
minate, 97-99, 116, 145. 

Tennyson, 3, 73; quoted, 
95. 

Theology, traditional, 139, 
149. 



Index 



193 



Time, mathematical, as 
distinguished from real, 
33, 49. 

Titchener, 78. 

Unity. See permanence, 
identity and continuity. 

Universe, goodness of, 156. 
See also optimism and 
pessimism. 



Vaihinger, 60, 61. 
Vitalism, 90. See also an- 
imism and creation. 
Voluntarism, 7. 

Weismann, 165-66. 
Will, freedom of, 103-110, 
116, 146^17. 

Zeno, 49. 



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